The Health app this year in iOS 18 has gained a new data set called Vitals, and essentially this combines five different data types we’ve gathered before, all from your Apple Watch, into one quick and concise overview of how your health is currently doing. These readings get measured overnight when you wear your watch to sleep, and when you explore them, you’ll see that it’s taking readings of various different things throughout the night.

Now, before I get any further, I say there are five different data types, and if you’re looking at my screen right now and you’re thinking, “Jacob, there’s only four there,” well, my watch doesn’t measure body temperature. So until I get a new watch, I won’t get all five data points on there, but it will still work no matter what device you’re using or what watch you have.

So what this will do is, it’s not going to give you all the details about how you slept and what sort of states of sleep you were in, but it will give you an idea of how it compares to your typical range of sleep. That means it will compare your length of sleep, blood oxygen levels, wrist temperature, respiratory rate, and heart rate to your typical range over the last weeks and months. In fact, if I tap on ‘typical’ here, you’ll see it up in blue.

The idea here is that if your data points are all within that range, then hopefully things are all good and nothing to worry about. But if your data points start going outside that range, particularly over the course of several days, it might be a sign that you’ve got perhaps a bug or an illness coming on, and you want to look into that.

Just like you’d expect in Health, at the top I can go into weekly view, monthly view, and six-monthly view, and I can see those trends over time. And you’ll see here that there’s one very, very low number that’s lit up in pink. That’s because I only had 3 hours’ sleep one night before going on an early train to London. So it wasn’t a bad health concern, but it was interesting for it to flag it up as a problem.
And just like other data types in Health, if you scroll down to the bottom, you’ll find lots more information about this particular set of data and what it means and how you can use it to empower you on your health journey.

And there are tons more things in iOS 18 that are kind of hidden just below the surface, like this feature, and I’d love to share them with you. Please do check out my channel down below where there are loads more QuickTips videos about all these new features, and I’ve written an eBook this year as well, ‘100 QuickTips for iOS 18’. I’d encourage you to check both out.