It’s now really easy to share your Health Data or to request someone in your family’s Health Data using iOS 16.

Here’s how to get it set up and why you might want to use it.

In the Health App at the bottom is a tab in the middle for Sharing.

When you go onto here you’re probably not sharing data already but you have a choice.

You can either share your data with someone else, or you can request to have access to someone else’s data.

If you request someone else’s data they’re going to get a message on their device, followed by the same process we’re going to see now.

So I’ll guide you through our end of things – if we were to share data with someone else.

So I’m going to turn on Sharing and then from here we’re going to choose who to share that data with.

For this example I’m going to share with my cat Polly (because that’s the demo Apple ID I’ve made up earlier!).

When we’ve chosen what contact to share with, we’re then going to get a wizard to follow through which will ask what data we do and don’t want to share.

And you can control this however you like.

First up there’s a list of suggested data that you perhaps might want to share quite commonly.

I’m going to turn these on, and on the next page we get Activity data.

Maybe how many steps, how far I’ve walked, some things perhaps are good to share – some things not so much.

Perhaps if you’re using this to support an elderly relative you might want to see their walking stability score or how much activity and active movement they’re doing each day.

Then on the next set of options we have Heart Metrics, heart rate, ECG results – that sort of thing.

Again you can choose which one of these (or all of these, or none of these) you want to share.

Next up we have data on Nutrition.

So you could perhaps choose to share how many calories you’re eating or how much water you’re drinking if you wanted to or needed to.

And then we’ve got some other miscellaneous things as well.

All of this is broken down into lots of detail, so you can choose exactly what you do and don’t want to share.

Finally we have the options to share Medications.

This could potentially be useful, again if you’re caring for an older relative, and you want to make sure they’ve had their medicine each day.

My favourite part of this feature is that on the last screen you get a summary of what you’ve chosen to share, and you can tap Preview to see exactly what the other person will see when they get your data.

You can check that everything is as you want it to be and go back and make changes if you need to.

And that’s it!

When you press Share that data will go to the contact you’ve chosen and vice versa if you’ve requested data from someone you’ll get access to that just like you saw in the preview on your device as well.

It’s not a feature for everyone, but if it is useful to you I hope you find it handy.