Health, Sleep, and more
Turn the music down! Go to bed!
YOUR APPLE WATCH can now take steps to protect your hearing, it can remind you to wash your hands to reduce the risk of virus transmission, and it can give you valuable insights into how well you’re sleeping.
We’ve had the Noise app warning us about loud sounds since watchOS 6, but your Watch is no longer just a passive listener. If you enable the Reduce Loud Sounds option it can adjust the volume of your headphones to ensure that you’re not subjecting your ears to excessive volume levels, and it now gives you a weekly listening report that can help warn you if your cumulative exposure to loud noises is potentially disastrous for your hearing.
Monitoring ongoing exposure is important because the World Health Organisation reports a significant rise in hearing loss among younger people in recent years, and suggests that headphones, particularly earbuds, play a significant role in that rise. We know very loud sounds can damage our hearing, but damage can also come from regular or prolonged exposure to sounds that aren’t so obviously dangerous. That damage is irreversible, so clearly it’s better to try to prevent it from happening.
BETTER BEDTIMES
The most significant new health–related feature in watchOS 7 is the long–rumored Sleep app. Simply wear your Watch to bed and it’ll use its accelerometer to detect the little movements you make as you breathe in and out. From that it can deduce when you’re asleep and when you’re not, and it shares that information with the Health app on your iPhone so you can see your sleeping trends over time.
When you enable Sleep Tracking, Apple asks you to set a sleep goal for how long you would like to sleep and what hours you’d like to sleep during those set times.
This information can then be used to automatically set alarms and activate the new sleep–related features. You can set different schedules for different days.
The Sleep app is accompanied by some nice new features including Sleep Mode, which puts your Watch (and iPhone) into Do Not Disturb mode and dims the display at whatever time you select. If, like us, you don’t have the same bedtime every night, that gets a bit annoying — Sleep Mode prevents your screen from waking or interrupting you, which is fine in bed but not so fine when you’re still in the pub. But its combination of scheduling and reminders can help you achieve a more regular bedtime routine. If you wish you can combine it with Wind Down, which can trigger specific Shortcuts such as launching a relaxation or reading app, or dimming your smart bulbs.
When you pick up your Watch in the morning it wishes you good morning, tells
you the time and your current battery charge level, and provides a quick weather forecast.
It’s worth noting that you don’t have to use Apple’s Sleep app if you’d rather use an existing third–party app instead. You can specify your sleep data source in the Health app’s Sleep section.
NOW WASH YOUR HANDS
The introduction of automatic handwashing may seem like a reaction to COVID–19, but it was actually in development years before. What started as a fun little additional feature feels a lot more serious now.
The handwashing sensing uses multiple inputs to work out if you’re washing your hands or just waving them about. Once it detects that you’re washing your hands, the timer lasts for 20 seconds. The motion sensors inside your Apple Watch tell it that you’re moving your hands in a particular way, and the microphone can hear the sounds of running water or squirting soap. Apple says it’s sensitive enough to recognize eco–taps that produce lower pressures than traditional plumbing. It can also use location awareness to remind you to wash your hands when you get home.