watchOS 11 brings an all-new Vitals app, which puts the Apple Watch more in tune with your wellness.
The Apple Watch is a top smartwatch with serious health features, but in recent years it’s been left behind by Whoop and Oura when it comes to wellness.
We outlined that in our Apple Watch Series 9 review, where we criticized the Apple Watch’s fitness tracking and iconic rings for feeling stale. It’s been a good motivator to get moving, but it doesn’t feel as in tune with our bodies and health as rivals.
But all that has changed with Apple Vitals, a new feature that’s part of watchOS 11, which was announced back at WWDC 2024.
How Vitals works
The new Vitals app is designed to put you in tune with your body. It works by taking the time to create a baseline of your personal stats.
It takes seven days of wearing the Apple Watch at night to build your baseline before you’ll see any data. It will use this baseline as a point of comparison for a daily overview of your stats. You don’t have to wear it on consecutive nights – but once you get seven nights worth of data, you’ll see the Vitals app populate with data.
When you wear your Apple Watch to bed and track sleep, it will monitor a set of vitals that include:
- Heart rate
- Respiratory rate
- Wrist temperature
- Sleep duration
- Blood oxygen (if available in that location).
These vitals are taken at rest so they’re constant, and not affected by moving around, a hot day or other external factors.
Highlighting outliers
Every morning the Vitals app will show how your key metrics compare to your established baseline. Most of the time this will be shown at ‘Typical’, which means everything is normal.
But if two of your vitals deviate significantly from your baseline while you’re asleep, then you will be alerted in the Apple Vitals app when you wake up. In this instance, you will see ‘2 Outliers’ (or more if you’re really in bad shape.)
A significant change in these stats can signal that something is up, and you should pay attention to your well-being.
It’s slightly different from Whoop 4.0, which uses a traffic light system for each of the same metrics. We’re yet to properly test Apple Vitals, but the Whoop Health Monitor (which works similarly to Vitals) is effective for making decisions around your lifestyle and training.
In the Whoop app, a yellow warning on a single stat should make you wary about training hard that day, for example. Apple Vitals seems more geared towards large changes in your physiology by only triggering a warning when two vital signs are out of line.
That means if you get a nudge from the Apple Vitals app about outliers, it’s worth sitting up and taking notice.
What factors affect Vitals
Alcohol consumption is a factor that can change your vitals, but so is the on-set of illness, and even overtraining.
So if there’s a big shift in your Vitals, it’s worth checking in with yourself about how you feel, and any obvious factors. And that might mean taking a rest day or revising your plans in the gym, or at work.
Apple Vitals also works alongside the new Training Load app. That means you can see if the amount you’re working out (tracked by Apple Watch of course) tallies with a change in your vitals.
We’ll be testing Vitals over the coming months, ahead of a proper public beta launch of watchOS 11.
