This year, Apple is scheduling an expansion to the iPhone health app, including additional sleep tracking and a mechanism to remind people to take medication.
This year, the company could also count body temperature sensing to the Apple Watch and is still working on inventing a blood pressure monitor.
The new medication tool in iPhone would allow users to scan pill bottles and follow when they take them. However, not all planned features would be available at launch.
A body temperature sensor could aid expand fertility tracking elements on the Apple Watch. For example, body temperature changes throughout the menstrual cycle, and that data can help predict when someone might get their period or the window when they’re most probably to become pregnant.
The Oura brilliant ring has a temperature sensor that provides users information about their menstrual course, and it’s FDA-cleared to provide data to the digital birth management Natural Cycles.
Apple pushed plans to add a blood pressure monitor to the Apple Watch in 2024. Blood pressure is a significant target for wearable companies and could make devices significantly more helpful in tracking cardiac health.
But the feature is notoriously challenging, and experts say it still requires more refinement before performing well in the real world.
Right now, the tech employed in smartwatches can generally only check whether blood pressure is growing or falling and would require to be calibrated against a standard cuff to provide a raw measure of blood pressure.
Apple seeks to use its feature to flag high blood pressure for wearers and is running trials on employees now.
Health is the health informatics mobile app announced on June 2, 2014 by Apple Inc. at its Worldwide Developers Conference. The app is included with iPhones and iPod Touch that run iOS 8 or later, and the Apple Watch starting with watchOS 1