Developing Heart Analyzer V8.5
It’s been around three months now since Heart Analyzer was last updated on the App Store. This is slightly behind our usual trend, but for good reason. We’re working on lots of new features behind the scenes and today some of those get to see the light of day! Headline changes for this update include:
New HRV complications on Apple Watch helping you easily keep track of this metric
New Range charts for VO2Max, Blood Oxygen Saturation and HRV on your iPhone
A visual refresh on the iPhone app with better navigation, new support sections and more
What I actually wanted to discuss here today is some findings and thoughts that I hope will interest our users and the Apple Watch community.
First up is VO2Max.
When Apple launched WatchOS 7 alongside the Series 6 Apple Watch, they promised that coming later that year (2020), all Apple Watch models with WatchOS 7 would gain new and improved Cardio Fitness measuring capabilities via the VO2Max metric. They also indicated this metric would be available to users with lower VO2Max ranges and could be calculated from less strenuous exercise. All sounds good.
However, if you do a search for Apple Watch WatchOS 7 Cardio Fitness you will mostly see pages of people having issues and concerns with the feature. This is disappointing to me as it is something I personally have found to be a really useful metric that seems to follow nicely in trend with my overall fitness. However, I do come with better news for WatchOS 7.3
For Heart Analyzer V8.5, we’ve been developing a new Range chart. This goes further than the old VO2Max chart which simply indicated monthly average values and now offers users an indication of the range of values recorded to make up that average. The front image for this post demonstrates that chart for my data. I was using WatchOS 7.2 between November and January, so if you look at that, you’ll see what I mean. The range of values I recorded for my VO2Max during these months was huge. So much so it almost makes the metric meaningless. To take the positive though, based on my data it looks like this has been resolved in the WatchOS 7.3 betas which I have been running since February.
As frustrating as this will have been for many Apple Watch users, I am still delighted that Apple develops these features and then continues to work on them if it gets things wrong. VO2Max is an excellent metric for your cardiac health and fitness and so I hope Heart Analyzer users find this new chart informative and motivating.
Heart Rate Variability.
This metric could almost be know as the Apple Watch dark horse. It was added as a feature for all models when Apple released WatchOS 4 nearly three and a half years ago. But since then , its impact never really seems to of made much of a splash. If you do a search for HRV, you will find loads of places telling you how important it is as an indicator of your overall fitness recovery, stress levels and general cardiac health. But if you’re like me, you’ve found it difficult to make sense of the data and identify trends.
I think the key thing here is when the Apple Watch actually decides to record this metric. For now, it is seemly random, every few hours so for a user who wears their Apple Watch at night, they might record 50 readings a week. By contrast, there are lots of apps on the App Store that encourage you to measure your HRV with your finger and iPhone camera and they seemly produce better trends than Apple Watch! The key things is habit and regularity. If you wake every morning and measure your HRV at the same time and state you are much more likely to be able to identify trends from this data. I have two things to improve this for now on Apple Watch and in the future hopefully Apple will be able to develop things further.
Heart Analyzer offers you new HRV complications right on your wrist to help you keep in touch with the metric. We also recently introduced a new filtered chart in the Deep Analytics section of the app. This lets you narrow timescales right down, filter out various data points and average the results over days, weeks and months. I hope this will help user see their trends amongst the noise.
The other thing I suggest for those keen to track their HRV is to get a regular reading every morning as the first thing they do in the day. Currently, the only way to force Apple Watch to take an HRV reading is to do a breathe session in the app on your Apple Watch, but that sounds like a great way to start the day if you ask me!
Heart Analyzer V8.5 is available today to download from the App Store. I really hope you enjoy the update and it continues to offer unique insights into your cardiac health.