Top 8 Apple Watch Apps to Help You Meet Your Health Goals
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There’s no doubt that the Apple Watch can be a powerful tool for people to monitor, track and take control of their health. And Cupertino is certainly marketing the Watch as such a tool.
Out-of-the-box, watchOS comes with a variety of awesome health-related apps. But there is also a wide range of third-party applications that can improve upon or add additional features to your Apple Watch — allowing you to craft the wearable into your all-in-one, health-boosting platform. Here’s a list of our favorite third-party health apps.
1. HealthTap
When you have an important health question, it’s probably best to consult a doctor instead of trying to Google an answer — luckily, HealthTap allows you to do just that.
The watchOS app allows you to ask medical questions and get quick answers from a network of over 68,000 registered doctors in the U.S. The app also tracks your virtual doctor consultations and can remind you when it’s time to take a prescribed medication.
You can download HealthTap for free here.
2. Tasteful
If you have a dietary restriction or food allergy, you might know how hard it is to find nearby restaurants that can accommodate your particular needs or preferences.
Tasteful can help you navigate restaurant menus. The app allows you to add dietary preferences or restrictions — such as vegan, paleo or gluten-free — and search menu items from nearby restaurants that match up. You can even tweak certain specifications to further customize your preferences — like eating mostly paleo but with some grains, or sticking to a vegetarian diet that allows seafood consumption.
Tasteful is available for free here.
3. Gymatic
The Apple Watch is awesome at tracking cardio exercises, but it can sometimes lack when tracking certain strength- or repetition-based exercises — something that Gymatic can help with.
After teaching Gymatic a particular movement and naming it, the app can automatically recognize and track the exercise — including how many reps you’ve done. Besides its own built-in workout log, it also offers Apple Health syncing. Best of all, it’s been tested to be accurate — so you can worry less about miscounted reps.
You can download it for free here, but some premium features cost a one-time fee
4. Centered
In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, meditation is an excellent way to take a step back and improve your mental health — and Centered can help.
The app features a variety of voice-guided meditation sessions in varying lengths. Additionally, it also asks you how you’re feeling from time to time, and uses that information to track how your mood fluctuates during a given week. Centered can also track steps, if you feel like you need to consolidate health and activity data into one app.
Centered is a free download, available here.
5. iHydrate
For all of the apps included on the Apple Watch, watchOS currently lacks a built-in tool to track daily water intake. That’s where iHydrate comes in.
After entering several factors like sex and weight, iHydrate determines how much water you should be drinking a day — and lets you track it directly from the app. It can also track water intake from other sources, such as coffee, milk and juice. The accompanying iPhone app lets you see your progress broken-down over time.
Download iHydrate here.
6. WebMD
WebMD is famous for its easily accessible and vast, internet reference guide, and has become something of a meme because of it. But the iPhone and watchOS app adds some additional functionality.
The app offers medication instructions and dosage information, and even reminds you when it’s take to take them. If it’s an especially critical medication, you can even add the reminder directly to your watch face so you don’t forget about it. Of course, the full iPhone version of the app offers all of the usual health information WebMD is known for.
The WebMD app is free, and available here.
7. Carrot Fit
If you’ve ever struggled with lacking the motivation to workout, Carrot Fit hopes to shame you into exercising.
The app’s artificial intelligence might threaten, inspire, ridicule or even bribe you into working out. And the fun and zany app features a variety of quirky seven-minute workouts, including running away from “attack ostriches” to traveling through time.
You can download it here — if you dare.
8. Clue
Obviously, the Apple Watch is an awesome tool for health. But for some reason, even though Apple device owners are more likely to be women, Cupertino didn’t add a period-tracking app when it launched HealthKit or watchOS.
Clue remedies that. The app lets women track their cycles, and uses that data to offer information such as period start date predictions, fertility windows, and PMS tracking. Along with in-depth reproductive health information and birth control dosage reminders, the app also promises users that there will be “no flowers, butterflies, euphemisms or pink — ever.”
It’s available to download here.