Michael Steer for 9to5Mac:

The introduction of iOS 8 in 2014 brought the Health app to our iPhones and marked a milestone in Apple’s efforts to help people live healthier lives. The success of the Apple Watch in the following years brought a renewed consciousness to healthy living to millions of customers. Now that the Health app is turning into a critical tool for managing medical data, let’s take a look at how it could become even more friendly and motivating to a growing community.

The majority of people using iPhones and Apple Watches to track their health have the simple wish to reach their goals and monitor their wellness. While today’s Health app is rich with data points and charts, it takes valuable time to dive in and parse the information. Even more challenging is drawing accurate and informed conclusions from the data without a medical background.

The Health app of the future could be a dashboard for your body, filled with daily insights into your wellness. Helpful tips for living a better life could be drawn from the treasure trove of data synced from your Apple Watch and connected apps, tailored to your specific health history and needs. Rather than just a data aggregator, Health could become a proactive and motivational tool.

The thing that I like the most of out his concept is having the actual health goals inside the Health app instead of just having it serve as a database, especially for nutritional data. I have tried to use third party apps like Lifesum and MyFitnessPal for nutritional tracking in the past but they never stuck because they all seem to want to replace the Health app instead of work with it¹.

They both will save data to the Health app, but they do not read data from it. Water that I track with WaterMinder (which is much better suited for tracking water) will not show up in my nutrition app even though it is available in the Health app. So to really use those nutrition apps right, you have to exclusively use them to track everything.

If the goals were a part of the Health app, I could ignore all those features in the actual nutrition apps and just use them for the tasks that they are best at like tracking my meals.