After WWDC last week, Apple Vice President of Technology Kevin Lynch has taken the time to discuss Apple Watch’s new sleep tracking and handwashing features on watchOS 7 with posts like The independent, CNETand TechCrunch.
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While some third-party apps provide very detailed sleep analysis, Apple’s sleep tracking implementation is pretty basic, focusing only on sleep duration, movement disturbances, and heart rate. Lynch told him CNET that this simplicity was an intentional decision, noting that Apple investigated and found that the additional data was not entirely helpful.
“The movement of your arm is an input, but it is not a complete picture of what is happening inside your brain,” Lynch said, as an example.
“You can’t really train to have more or fewer REM stages,” he added. “We felt that that was not the best way that Apple could add value here in the dream. We focused on the transition to bed, which we believe is much more actionable, and will result in people sleeping better, which then it has side effects from maybe its REM stages sorting out. “
Lynch said that, through research, Apple finally determined that sleep duration is the most important metric.
“In any of these adventures that we follow when we build things here, we ask, what will make the most difference for people that, from a general perspective, will be easy, useful and empowering,” said Lynch. The independent.
Like many other health features on the Apple Watch, the Sleep app only provides positive reinforcement. If users meet their sleep goals, they receive positive feedback, but if they don’t, the watch remains silent.
“There could be anxiety that people have about going to sleep, and that anxiety itself can cause more problems in terms of going to sleep,” Lynch said. CNET. “Many people are already aware that they haven’t had enough sleep, so we are not adding to that, but we are positively acknowledging when they have achieved their goals.”
As for the handwash training on watchOS 7, Lynch said TechCrunch that the functionality was the result of “years of work”. The feature encourages users to wash their hands for the CDC-recommended 20 seconds by providing a countdown with haptic feedback. If a user chooses, the feature is automatically activated when the sound of hand washing is detected.
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