What is New in the Area of Health Apps for iPhone
Well, I have always been a believer that the iPhone offers a very versatile platform for tracking your exercise, your biking, walking, running…etc health related endeavors we all have. As you know from this blog postings – I tried the Apple Watch and was rather frustrated with its lack of good repeatable measurements. At the same time the iPhone has been relatively solid performer with a slew of applications – e.g. (in no particular order):
Earlier last week during the holidays, I decided to figure out how I can aggregate all the apps tracking information via the Apple Health application – why? because I wanted to track all my walking, jogging, biking, hiking exercise as an aggregate.
So I tried to accomplish that. Took me a while to figure out what applications actually interface with the Apple Health app.
Well, turns out all of the apps have gaps in their ability to synch up with the main Health app
So I am using Argus, Bike+(b+), MountainBike-Pro, and Under Armor Record – all of these applications have the ability to measure relatively accurately the distance, steps, calories, miles of walking, hiking, biking, BUT – there is the big disappointment – they all have gaps in their ability to interface, synch and feed into the iPhone Health app.
Here is the summary of what I have found so far:
Under Armor’s Record is the application which allows you to capture your Hiking, Walking and Biking exercise – but when I tried to synch up and connect the app with iPhone Health – I was able to, the apps connected – but I was only able to get the walking results into the Health app.
Why?
I could not tell…!
I tried all sort of options – but NO luck with getting the biking info into the aggregation app.
Here is the information from the Under Armor Record application – it properly captured the exercise info but no luck getting it into the Health App
The other issue that i found, although I would say that is a smaller issue as it only relates to how calories are counted.
The Under Armor Record captured my biking distance and calories at a much lower level vs what both Argus and MountainBike Pro recorded.
Again – no big deal as it just means one of them is more accurate – who knows.
Here are the other two (Argus, MountainBike Pro):
So, net-net, Argus injected the information of calories into the Health App, Under Armor Record injected the Walking data, and the actual Cycling info from all three Apps (Argus, MountainBike Pro, Under Armor Record) never made it in…! Very frustrating. Next few days I will try Bike+(b+) to see if it will feed into the Health App – it is supposed to….! I want to find the way to get all my excise data / results into one place….and I will find a way to do it.
Will report on my progress in the next posting…