Apple is planning an expansion to the iPhone health app this year that would include additional sleep tracking and a tool to remind people to take medication, Bloomberg reported. The company could also add body temperature sensing to the Apple Watch this year and is still working on developing a blood pressure monitor.
The new medication tool would let users scan pill bottles and track when they took the medication. Not all planned features would be available at launch.
A body temperature sensor could help expand fertility tracking features on the Apple Watch. Body temperature changes over the course of the menstrual cycle, and that data can help predict when someone might get their period or the window when they’re most likely to become pregnant. The Oura smart ring has a temperature sensor that gives users information about their period, and it’s FDA-cleared to feed data to the digital birth control Natural Cycles.
Apple pushed plans to add a blood pressure monitor to the Apple Watch back to 2024, Bloomberg reported. Blood pressure is a major target for wearable companies and could make devices significantly more useful for tracking cardiac health. But the feature is notoriously tricky, and experts say it still needs more refinement before it can perform well in the real world.
Right now, the tech used in smartwatches can generally only check whether blood pressure is rising or falling and would need to be calibrated against a standard cuff to give a raw measure of blood pressure. Apple aims to use its feature to flag high blood pressure for wearers, according to Bloomberg, and is running trials on employees now.
