Apple Activity Trends Will Transform How You Think About Steps
You’ve spent years tracking your health and fitness activity on your Apple Watch. But is your health and fitness actually improving?
Your about to find out, thanks to Apple's latest fitness innovation. Meet Apple Activity Trends. Announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference, the latest addition to Apple’s potent Health app isn’t going to revolutionize the way you work out, but it is going to change how you evaluate your own fitness.
The big moral of the story: Don't sweat a few missed steps on a single day, but think carefully about the long-term. That's what Activity Trends wants you focusing on, and it's a smart move. We're conditioned to know the amount of steps (and flights of stairs, and a host of other stuff) we complete in any single day, but fitness is a marathon, not a sprint. And Apple wants you thinking marathon.
That's where Activity Trends comes in. With Activity Trends, Apple will show you how you've performed over the last 90 days, and the last 365 days in several key stats: Stand time, Distance traveled, Flights of stairs, Hours you found time to stand, Cardio Fitness, Walking pace, and Running pace. The objective: To give you a quick sense of whether you're improving or declining in each category.
The information isn't life-changing, but it can be useful. Activity Trends doesn't overanalyze any of the information (a good thing), but by delivering the basics to you, you'll be able to analyze your improvement or decline for yourself. Are your daily flights of stairs lower now than they were a year ago? Maybe they built a new elevator in your building, and you've been using it frequently. Are your stand minutes up? Maybe that packed morning office meeting is doing you some good.
Apple chose its measures of fitness carefully, using existing measures that the Apple Watch tracks by default, and also adding some more complex measures as well in Running Pace, Walking Pace, and Cardio Fitness. These three new categories offer you a chance to collect more advanced fitness data, but they do take some work: You'll need to go through a run, walk, or outdoor walk (to calculate estimated Vo2 max, a measure of cardio fitness). These new categories won't be for everyone, but they are a welcome addition for more advanced fitness fans.
The new features should show up on Apple Watch and iOS this fall.
How’s Your Hearing?
Activity Trends was far from the only announcement at Apple’s annual apps bonanza. The tech giant is also looking to safeguard a sense you often take for granted, your hearing.
Meet the new Apple Watch Noise app. This simple new utility will occasionally sample the noise levels around you, letting you know when things get loud enough to cause long-term damage to your ears. It’ll do this without ever invading your privacy; Apple promises that Noise app isn’t listening all the time, and it won’t record or store any data.
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