December 23th 2024
A Big Well-Being Feature Drop
Before we put our legs up and slowly slip into the end-of-year holidays, here’s the last BIG feature drop of the year: a parting gift focused on your wellbeing.
Health Metrics: New Trends
7-day trend: we squeezed trends onto the condensed health metrics overview! You can see it for each available metric, all nested neatly under your daily wellbeing recap.
14-day trend: on an expanded view (compared to a 10-day trend previously).
New (RMSSD) HRV Calculations
Improving HRV usability has been on our minds for a long time, and we finally got to it.
The new HRV calculations are more accurate for assessing your recovery, while the original method was better for evaluating how regular your heart rhythm is—which is why Apple included it in the first place (to detect AFib).
SDNN calculates the average value of HRV in milliseconds and shows how far your HRV is from that average. It’s considered the “gold standard” for assessing cardiac risk, predicting both morbidity and mortality.
Our new method uses RMSSD, which measures the time differences between each successive heartbeat. This gives you a precise, moment-to-moment view of your HRV, making it especially useful for understanding how training loads and recovery processes are affecting your body.
To enable RMSSD calculations, you’ll need to allow “Beat-to-beat Measurements” tracking—a pop-up will appear in the app. Would love to know how this affects your experience.
Menstrual Cycle Upgrade
Gentler Streak is not a menstrual app per se, but the cycle and its correlation with daily readiness have been part of our holistic guidance since the launch of the Wellbeing tab in February 2023. With this update we are taking it a bit deeper while still keeping it activity-oriented:
New metrics added: previous cycle length, 1-year cycle variability.
Perimenopause: your guidance will adapt accordingly if you select Perimenopause during Menstrual Cycle onboarding. You can adjust this in Settings under the Menstrual Cycle feature (upper right corner).
An irregular period can now be as short as one day.
All recorded menstruation days are now logged into HealthKit (not just the first day as before).
There’s now an option to “End Period” in the app when your period ends, which will also log into HealthKit.
New Insights: Recognizing Perimenopause, Menopause and Your Body, Menopause and Your Emotions, Menopause and Staying Active
Your Health Metrics While You Sleep
This one’s for all the sleepers, snoozers, early birds, late-night owls, dreamers... who wear their watch to bed. Curious about how your body behaves while you sleep? You can spy on it now. Health metrics now available in the Sleep Stages chart: you’ll see all available body metrics—sleeping heart rate, HRV, oxygen levels, etc, and their state during the night. The same applies to the Short-Term Overview charts.
With this, we wave goodbye to 2024: thank you, you’ve been fantastic to us, and we can’t wait to meet your successor! To you, our dear tribe, we wish a peaceful outro to 2024, spent exactly the way it suits you most.
p. s. On the 1st of January don’t forget to check your full 2024 Activity Recap!
