At its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2022, Apple unveiled WatchOS 9 with a range of new features to keep you fit and healthy.
For starters, Apple showed off four new watch faces coming with WatchOS 9, including ‘Metropolitan,’ ‘Playtime,’ ‘Lunar Calendar and ‘Astronomy face.’ Additionally, the front-end bring a new Siri UI and banner notification for some of your favourite apps with WatchOS 9.
On the fitness side of things, Apple revealed that three new running form metrics are coming to the Workout app, which makes use of the Apple Watch’s accelerometer and gyro to establish your running form, ground contact time and stride length to determine whether you’re wasting energy while you’re running or not. In addition to the running form, the watch will also be able to detect your heart rate and categorize it into zones to determine your running intensity, and whether you need to slow down, take a rest or pick up the pace.
The fitness app will be available to all iPhone users running iOS 16, so you can track steps, flights climbed, estimate your total calories burnt and even you can share your results with friends without owning an Apple Watch.
To help keep you healthy while you’re not working out, Apple has also updated the Sleep app to help users learn more about sleep stages. The Watch uses the heart rate sensor and the built-in accelerometer to determine which sleep stage you were in at what time at night, including REM, Core and Deep sleep stages.
Additionally, Apple is also adding features to help people diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AFIB). With WatchOS 9, users would be able to track the time your heart shows symptoms of AFIB, time spent in AFIB, the time of day or week when AFIB was most active and the ability to share a PDF of your AFIB history directly with your doctor. According to Apple, it expects to “receive FDA clearance for AFIB soon.” It’s unclear when or if the feature will make its way to Canada.
Bolstering the Watch’s ability to keep you healthy, with WatchOS 9, users will now be able to keep a record of their medications, with alerts to notify you when you need to take a specific medication.
More to come…
Image credit: Apple