Last night, Apple pushed out iOS 8.2 to my iPhone, an update to its operating system. The blurb for the update promised “improvements to the Health app.” Finally, I thought. When HealthKit was first introduced last year, it came under criticism for not taking women’s health needs into consideration. The Apple app tracks an amazing assortment of possible health indicators: sleep, body mass index, number of times fallen, “electrodermal activity,” sleep, weight, sodium intake, copper intake, and even selenium intake. But it didn’t track the one thing most women want to track: their periods.
It seems kind of obvious that Apple should include this.
One note: it’s not HealthKit that the author of the article launched, but the Health app. The latter is an interface for the HealthKit framework. It might be possible for HealthKit to manage metrics other than those displayed in the Health app, allowing other apps to access that data. I’m not sure if this is the case, but I would expect that HealthKit might be extensible.
via Apple has a lady problem: the new version of HealthKit still doesn’t track periods — Fusion.