Gyroscope Health

Track everything about yourself

Free/Pro $9.99 a month From Gyroscope Innovations, gyroscope.pe Made for iPhone Needs iOS 9.3 or later

The rise of smartphones over the last few years has led to an exponential increase in the number of apps to track your lifestyle and daily habits.

Much of the data from these apps finds its way into Apple’s HealthKit, which provides a convenient, if uninspiring, summary of overall wellbeing in the stock Health app. Third–party app Gyroscope tries to go one better, however, by integrating all these data points and more into a unified personal profile that offers users a detail–rich story about themselves via visually impressive daily or weekly report cards.

Here’s how it works. Gyroscope’s initial setup involves granting the app permission to retrieve data from as many sources as possible, from Strava and Apple Health on the health and fitness front, to productivity tracking service RescueTime and even movement mapping via Foursquare and Moves. The more of these sources you allow Gyroscope to grab, the better, otherwise you’ll end up missing out on what this “operating system for the human body” is trying to do.

A good example is the way Gyroscope tries to detect your sleeping habits. The app’s algorithmic AI uses your step count and combines it with data from RescueTime to decide if you were asleep during a given period of time. It then looks at location data from Moves or Foursquare, and modifies your recorded sleep times if it sees locations changing during periods that it “thought” you were asleep.

We found Gyroscope’s sleep/activity tracking to be more accurate than the Fitbit app alone, but only when all data sources were available — disabling just one make its analyses a lot less insightful.

The plethora of customizable report cards (some of which require a Pro subscription) is impressive, and all can be shared with fellow Gyroscope users and via any social media integrations. All this is provided you don’t harbor privacy concerns.

the bottom line. An ambitious app that delivers, if you sync it with multiple apps. Tim Hardwick

Gyroscope’s data sources are presented as a series of updating report cards.

Each report card shows tracked data as a visual graph or map.