Health App Gains New 'Symptoms' Section in iOS 13.6 Beta

[vodkaPT]

Dr. Apple

 

[cuencap]

Best I can tell, from the Health app’s perspective, it’s strictly for logging symptoms over time. A third-party app can log those symptoms as part of a flow to reveal potential diagnoses within the app, though.

My guess is these symptoms will be tracked to your current vitals and eventually Health will be able to tell you “this is causing that.”

I love the data collected so far with the watch and workouts and whatnot but there currently isn’t a next level use for health. Sharing workouts with friends is cute but even that is super limited.

My hope is that in the future, the AW has additional sensors and health is able to tell you why you’re feeling a certain way. In seeing people in their 60s around me, 90% of the time the correct suggestion would be “drink more water.”

 

[EndersShadow]

Waiting now for the tin foil hat folk to claim this is Apple tracking who has Corona.

Straw-man fallacy. It’s like saying Only flat-Earther’s would believe google tracks and sells phone users data.

 

[BATman.Berlin]

I love the data collected so far with the watch and workouts and whatnot but there currently isn’t a next level use for health.

Agree, Health is not even able to tell me if I should wait till my next workout. Garmin has simple recovery time tracking to help you not to make things worse by doing too much. Simple stats such as improved pace or reduced heart rate at similar pace would be much better to assess if workouts are actually improving things. Heart rate recovery from AW is flawed since it does not start counting from the moment you go from running into cool down. It counts from the moment you stop your workout. If I want a proper HRR reading, I either do no cool down or I lose at least 10 min of my workout routine recording. Little things. Who needs a symptom tracker. There are already thousands of these.

 

[Matt.Cheetham]

Is there a complete list of the available symptoms for entry? The article shows a clipped screenshot and mentions just a few examples. I’m curious as to what‘s on the list.

 

[kevinp8192]

Just add emoji support and we’re almost there.

 

[urtules]

That's all well and good but in today's connected world I wonder if these "symptoms" can at some point be used against us when it comes to, for instance, getting insurance coverage or when we fill out that job application. There's a point were I feel it's too much information.

If you install the insurance app and give it access to health explicitly, otherwise consider this as your personal journal. If you still paranoid worried that Apple is going to share your Health data you can disable iCloud sync and iCloud backup and do encrypted backup to your computer. Then you will be the only person on the planet with a password to decrypt this data.

 

[Cmdrx3]

To me it's just the new stocks app. I never use it, but I can never get rid of it.

 

[compwiz1202]

Reminds me of this:

LOL I was just thinking the same thing except allergies instead of a paper cut.
[automerge]1591813072[/automerge]

Is this just for your own health journal of sorts, or does the app actually analyze your symptoms and tell you if you might have some likely health issue? Not that this type of thing has ever worked in the past but I dunno, machine learning and cloud bla bla bla who knows.

I think that could somewhat work if there was a way to add an official Dr Diagnosis.

 

[iOS Geek]

Is there a complete list of the available symptoms for entry? The article shows a clipped screenshot and mentions just a few examples. I’m curious as to what‘s on the list.

I dug through it and here‘s what’s in the section. They ALL include options for “present” or “not present”. Some of them also include “mild”, “moderate”, and “severe”.

• Abdominal cramps
• Acne
• Appetite changes
• Bloating
• Body and muscle ache
• Breast pain
• Chest tightness or pain
• Chills
• Congestion
• Constipation
• Coughing
• Diarrhea
• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Fever
• Headache
• Heartburn
• Hot flashes
• Loss of smell
• Loss of taste
• Lower back pain
• Mood changes
• Nausea
• Pelvic pain
• Rapid, pounding, or fluttering heartbeat
• Runny nose
• Shortness of breath
• Skipped heartbeat
• Sleep changes
• Sore throat
• Vomiting
• Wheezing

 

[iOS Geek]

I must say...from a nurse/patient perspective...I love this feature. I’m maternity and NICU, so on the maternity end of things, I could see this being pretty useful for the mother. When my wife was pregnant, she had a separate app for things like this. Nice to see Apple starting to add more into Health. The more they can fit in there, the better!

Off the top of my head...Since they’ve already got a section dedicated for Cycle Tracking and some associated symptoms, it would be nice to see a section dedicated to pregnancy. (Think of the other cycle tracking apps that have an “I’m pregnant” mode).

 

[slamuelrock]

I

I dug through it and here‘s what’s in the section. They ALL include options for “present” or “not present”. Some of them also include “mild”, “moderate”, and “severe”.

• Abdominal cramps
• Acne
• Appetite changes
• Bloating
• Body and muscle ache
• Breast pain
• Chest tightness or pain
• Chills
• Congestion
• Constipation
• Coughing
• Diarrhea
• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Fever
• Headache
• Heartburn
• Hot flashes
• Loss of smell
• Loss of taste
• Lower back pain
• Mood changes
• Nausea
• Pelvic pain
• Rapid, pounding, or fluttering heartbeat
• Runny nose
• Shortness of breath
• Skipped heartbeat
• Sleep changes
• Sore throat
• Vomiting
• Wheezing

[/QUOT

I dug through it and here‘s what’s in the section. They ALL include options for “present” or “not present”. Some of them also include “mild”, “moderate”, and “severe”.

• Abdominal cramps
• Acne
• Appetite changes
• Bloating
• Body and muscle ache
• Breast pain
• Chest tightness or pain
• Chills
• Congestion
• Constipation
• Coughing
• Diarrhea
• Dizziness
• Fainting
• Fever
• Headache
• Heartburn
• Hot flashes
• Loss of smell
• Loss of taste
• Lower back pain
• Mood changes
• Nausea
• Pelvic pain
• Rapid, pounding, or fluttering heartbeat
• Runny nose
• Shortness of breath
• Skipped heartbeat
• Sleep changes
• Sore throat
• Vomiting
• Wheezing

I started logging some things and I don’t really get what choosing ‘present’ would mean, because it still asks for an ending time. I don’t know when the symptom will end...

 

[Crowbot]

Hopefully, it won’t say a person may have x given the symptoms. Apple would face a class action over such, in my opinion.

Well I would expect that if someone checked off "Chest pain or tightness" it would say "See your doctor!!".