Here’s How Apple’s New watchOS 11 ’Vitals’ App Works
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One of the most significant new health features coming to the Apple Watch in watchOS 11 is “Vitals,” which promises to give you even more insight into your health and fitness by spotlighting important trends.
While Vitals is packaged as a standalone watchOS app, it’s more of a function of the overall health monitoring features of the Apple Watch. The Vitals app is mostly there to give you easier insight into the data that watchOS records anyway, such as heart rate, sleep, and blood oxygen levels. On the iPhone, that same data is presented in a separate card in the Health app.
Hence, there’s nothing you need to switch on to make Vitals work. In fact, there’s only one thing you really need to do: wear your Apple Watch to bed every night.
To make your Apple Watch data work for you, you’ll need to sleep with it. Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health
That’s because, like the temperature sensor that was added to the Apple Watch in 2022, data for Vitals is only tracked while you’re sleeping. While the need to sleep with your Apple Watch is understandable for at least one metric — sleep duration — the other four are less obvious. Those include heart rate, respiratory rate, wrist temperature, and blood oxygen.
Wrist temperature is something that’s only been recorded while you sleep from the very beginning. That’s because it doesn’t read a specific body temperature; instead, it establishes a baseline and then tells you if your temperature is higher or lower than that. Since your body temperature can vary widely throughout the day as you move through different activities and environments, there’s no way to get a reliable baseline or even compare new measurements to that, rendering comparative temperature readings taken during the day useless.
However, the results can be quite useful when the temperature sensor can take every reading under controlled conditions — which are typically the same every night as you sleep. For women, it helps to track ovulation cycles, but even folks who have no use or interest in that can benefit from abnormal temperature readings that could indicate illness.
For example, in December 2022, my Apple Watch Series 8 provided the first sign that I had caught the COVID-19 virus. Thankfully, the experience didn’t turn out too bad, but waking up to a temperature reading 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher (1.39 Celsius) than normal was a pretty big clue that something was up.
Combined with feeling a little bit tired under the weather, it prompted me to take a rapid test, revealing that I’d caught the ‘vid.
Vitals applies the same logic to several other metrics, establishing a baseline for heart rate, blood oxygen, and respiratory rate along with wrist temperature, and then more proactively letting you know if anything is off or abnormal.
That’s a nice bonus since I only noticed my unusually high temperature in 2022 because I regularly checked it. Vitals will alert you to such abnormalities even when you’re not paying attention to your health readings.
However, like wrist temperature, these other health factors can vary widely during the day, making it impossible for your Apple Watch to determine what’s “normal.” The only way to get reliable readings is to gather them while you sleep.
In an interview with CNET, Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health, explains:
The “biggest behavior change” most Watch users will have to make to get the most out of Vitals, according to Desai, is to go to bed with it. Tucked safely away from daytime stress, activity and movement that can influence health metrics like heart rate or temperature, health information collected overnight can give you a more complete picture of your baseline or “basal” state, according to Desai. CNET
Like other Apple Watch health features, Apple is very careful to emphasize that these are merely indicators, not diagnoses.
We don’t say, ‘You need to go talk to a doctor.’ We’re really thoughtful about not unnecessarily queuing you to go to the doctor.Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple’s vice president of health
After all, there can be a lot of factors that can throw off your Vitals. Perhaps you just got a bad night’s sleep, or you had an extra cup of coffee or another caffeinated beverage right before bedtime, or maybe you’re just feeling under the weather with a common illness like a cold. None of those are reasons to rush out to the doctor, but it’s still worth knowing that something is up.
As Apple explains in the Vitals section of the iOS 18 Health app, “it takes about a week’s worth of sleep sessions to establish your baseline ranges and they’ll continue to refine if you consistently wear your Apple Watch to bed.”
There’s no option to turn Vitals off; since it’s using data that your Apple Watch is already collecting, it works silently behind the scenes. The only option is a toggle to decide whether you want to be notified when your vitals are out of spec. Toggle that off, and you can safely ignore the app if you like, but it’s actually very beneficial. If you already use your Apple Watch for sleep tracking, you’ll automatically get the extra benefits of Vitals as soon as you update to watchOS 11.
