Health & Fitness Q&A

Can Apple Watch please add support for cycling VO2max algorithm and tracking? I sheared my meniscus trail running, ending my running career, and I’m solely cycling for cardio now. I’ve now had to adopt a xxxxxx watch which supports cycling VO2max calc and tracking, and I miss my Apple Watch. Enabling BT pairing to a power meter would provide HR-Power-Cadence (or with a head unit synched to a pm ++ Speed and VAM)

I'm using HKLiveWorkoutDataSource and HKWorkoutRouteBuilder. The running workouts my app supports can be timed or distance-based, so the user may complete the workout while the phone is locked. In this case, the workout route cannot be saved because HealthKit is locked. To work around this issue, I save route data to the device and listen for UIApplication.protectedDataDidBecomeAvailableNotification to later add the route to the workout. Note, this is not needed on the watch, just the phone. Is this limitation by design, or is there a better way to handle it? BTW, thanks for making these APIs available on the phone in iOS 26 and also adding the heart rate zone APIs in 27

Sometimes my users would like to update an Apple Health workout after it's been saved. For example, maybe they forgot to end the workout and want to trim it. Or maybe it was a treadmill workout, and they want to add the stats from the treadmill. The way I've attempted to do this in the past is to create a new HKWorkoutBuilder, call beginCollection, and add the data the user wants to keep from the original workout (events, activities, samples, workout route, and metadata with an incremented HKMetadataKeySyncIdentifier. After all that, I call endCollection() and finishWorkout() on the builder. Is this the right way to go about it? For trimming a workout, it would be great to have a way to just duplicate a workout with an adjusted start and end time and have HealthKit do all the hard work of trimming data.

Please could you give access to BGHealthResearchTaskRequest beyond Health Research apps. I can't see any rational why this API is restricted to Health Research apps. Without it, it is impossible to provide a decent UX based on historical data. Thanks, Stéphane FB22560687

Time to time, my app is killed in the background while handling HKObserverQuery. I always call the completion handler using a defer handler. It looks like I query a lot of data in the background. Can this be a reason for background termination, and how to handle it gracefully?

Everyday, when I am running on a standard 400m playground,I suffer that the distance which Apple Watch shows is always about 50m less than the standard 400m. If I run a much longer distance ,the terrible mistake nearly drives me mad. Also, the location the Apple Watch shows is often completely mistaken from the real.In China ,the playground mode still cannot be used, all aspects of the running exercises measuring give us a terrible experience.How could you deal with it and now what methods we have can avoid these problems?!!!

I have an app which allows users to track metrics not tracked by HealthKit. Where HealthKit is available we do sync there. I haven't had much time to play with it yet so I'm still trying to figure out the scope of what I might do, but I'm interested in adding Siri AI features to the app. I was wondering if there is any general guidance around either submitting non-HealthKit data to Siri AI. Both technical and non-technical. For example, is there any rule against submitting health data to Siri AI? And is there a recommended way to associate data with HealthKit. For example in the app body water percentage can be associated with a Body Mass entry in HealthKit.

I'm a biomedical researcher specializing in chronobiology and circadian time-series analysis. I'm developing cosinor-based algorithms for circadian phenotyping and chronotherapy optimization at the individual level, and I'm at the point where population-scale data would meaningfully improve model calibration. Apple Health's longitudinal passive sensor streams — particularly HRV, sleep staging, resting heart rate, and activity cadence — are well-suited to this kind of work. My question is whether Apple has an established pathway for academic researchers to access aggregate or privacy-preserving representations of Health data (e.g., via differential privacy or federated computation), and if so, what the eligibility and process look like.

Is it safe to call HKHealthStore authorizationStatus() and getRequestStatusForAuthorization() on the main thread? It seems that these methods occasionally block. Any best practices for guiding a user to grant all required Apple Health permissions for a workout app? Because of privacy concerns, its difficult to know what permissions a user has granted or denied in order to guide them appropriately.

Are there any updates to the Health app to be aware of that are part of the releases but weren’t mentioned in the keynote or PSTOU? The heart rate zones didn’t mention anything either, perhaps there are no changes other than that and the new menopause related data.

What’s the recommended way to determine whether HealthKit data is being accessed on an iPad versus an iPhone? My goal isn’t really to identify the device type itself, but to know whether the HealthKit data is likely being viewed on the device where it was originally recorded, or on a device that receives the data via HealthKit/iCloud syncing. This matters because synced HealthKit data can appear with a delay, and I’d like to set appropriate expectations for users. I previously used UITraitCollection.current.userInterfaceIdiom == .pad as a proxy for this, but that API is being deprecated. Is there a better way to distinguish between locally recorded HealthKit data and data that has arrived via sync, or otherwise identify when the app is running on an iPad?

Since there were not 1:1 labs available for HealthKit, I’d like to just share to the team continued interest in some feedbacks related to Medication API from last year. FB18310503 FB18310200 FB18309972 To update the post with a question, are there any medications API changes since the release in iOS 26.0? There was a short session video last summer but I haven't found anything 'new'.

We ship a focus timer where every session is user-initiated: the user deliberately starts a 25- or 45-minute session, then it's logged. We'd like that focused time to live in the user's health picture alongside sleep, exercise, and State of Mind, as self-reported context — the same standing as manually entered steps, and never inferred from device usage. The nearest interval type today is HKCategoryTypeIdentifier.mindfulSession, but its semantics are meditation. Is writing focused-work intervals to mindfulSession considered a misuse of the type? And if so, what's the recommended way to represent self-reported focus time until a dedicated type exists?

When will ResearchKit get the needed overhaul to be fully compatible with Liquid Glass? CareKit is a SwiftUI first offering with many customization points, but ResearchKit, its older sibling, hasn’t merged the SwiftUI work. I’d like to see SwiftUI, distribution as a Swift Package, and more frequent versioned releases. Can anything be shared on the state of and plans for ResearchKit going forward? It is open source so there isn’t a good way to file feedback other than just sending to the HealthKit team. FB9558499 FB15694524 FB20292373

Since there were not 1:1 labs available for HealthKit, I’d like to just share to the team continued interest in some feedbacks related to the sleep disturbances API from last year. FB20332832 FB20330679 To make this not just a transfer of feedbacks here is a question. How can you create a sleep disturbance value on the simulator? The Health app allows you to show a sheet to create one, but the values I enter don't seem to be valid and the save button is never functional. FB20979381 - Simulator / HealthKit: The Simulator allows for launching a 'create breathing disturbances' sample but never permits saving

Workout Activities are very useful for tracking metrics for each interval of a HIIT workout (e.g. Run/Walk or Work/Recover intervals for core body workout). However, if the workout contains lots of intervals (50 or more), I find that saving all those workout activities slow down saving the workout to Apple Health. Is this an appropriate use of workout activities? If so, it would be great to be able to set the activity type for each activity (e.g. run or walk).

How do you suggest developers help users get their EMRs setup and connected? I don’t want to maintain custom instructions that are potentially os-version and device varying. There isn’t a way to deep link the user directly to that page, but if there was that would help me bring more products online with consuming health records, as well as making that recommendation to the user to connect — which helps all apps. FB9950311 Sorta related is the desire to deep link the user to the manage health settings page. Same thing, don’t want to maintain updating documentation I don’t control. My users need help changing their decisions and ‘go to Apple health’ isn’t great. Do you have any recommendations to Apple support articles or other ways to cleanly and simply educate users on how to manage their choices? FB13683502

How can third party workout apps take advantage of the announced improvements to treadmill workouts metric tracking? Are those improvements available on both watchOS and iOS?

Is this exclusive to the Apple Watch Workout app? If I make a third party workout app, and use a workout builder to create a running workout, will that workout still cause VO2Max values to be generated? Similar question for Cardio Recovery values.