At its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced today new capabilities coming to its native Health app as part of the iOS 15 update. The app is adding an improved method to assess your risk of falling, a new health sharing capability, trend analysis, and more.
Starting this fall, the Health app will measure your balance, stability, and coordination as you walk with your iPhone in order to assess your fall risk. This assessment will be displayed on a new metric called Walking Steadiness in the app, which will classify your movements as OK, low, or very low. Apple noted that the metric uses real-world data gathered from more than 100,000 participants. The new feature will be available on the iPhone 8 or later.
In addition, the app will display more trend analyses for health data in iOS 15, covering 20 types of health metrics. This will show up in the Trends section and will include resting heart rate, sleep, and cardio fitness. Trends will help you monitor changes to your health data over time.
You will also gain the ability to share specific data from the Health app directly with your healthcare provider or physician, including heart rate, detected falls, and hours of sleep. You can also share the same data points with family members for the first time.
Apple will also improve the labs experience in the Health Records and allow you to store medical records of immunizations and test results directly in the Health app. The tech giant also unveiled additional health updates for the Apple Watch as part of the WatchOS 8 announcement.
As always, these pieces of information will be encrypted. The developer preview of iOS 15 is available starting today while a public beta will open next month.