How Apple’s iOS 13 for iPhones will make it easier for you to monitor your health

Wellness has become a major focus for Apple, with CEO Tim Cook telling CNBC in January that the company’s “greatest contribution to mankind” will be about health.

Apple is taking this notion a step further in iOS 13 with an array of new features coming to the iPhone’s Health app, including a closer look at activity trends and a new metric for measuring auditory health.

This is what you can expect from the new Health app when iOS 13 launches your iPhone this autumn.

A more comprehensive home screen

The revamped Health app will have a much different look than the current version, with a home screen that provides a snapshot of your favourite metrics and general highlights. This is called the Summary view, and from here you will be able to tap into individual statistics to see more information or view all your health data and highlights.

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It’s a stark difference from the Health app in iOS 12, which displays your activity from the current day by default and has a separate tab that organises each type of health metric by category.

The new home screen provides more information at a glance, including highlights that show how specific metrics like sleep compare to the week before.

A better snapshot of your health data

Instead of having to tap each category to see information about metrics like activity and your heart, the new Health Data section serves up a wealth of data right away. When tapping the “Show all health data” button from the Summary, you will be brought to a page that lists recent readings for all of your relevant metrics for the current day.

It shows progress made towards your stand rings, your resting heart rate and general heart rate, the distance you have walked and run, the number of steps you have taken. You can tap any of these statistics to get more information, such as how that metric compared to the previous week.

As is the case with the Summary page, the biggest benefit of this new interface is the ability to view more data quicker – with fewer taps. All of these statistics are one tap away from the Health app’s home screen, for example, whereas in the current app you have to navigate to the Health Data tab and choose a data category (activity, heart, sleep) to access metrics that are not shown in the Today view.

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More insight into your activity

The new Highlights section gives Apple’s Health app a key characteristic that had been missing: Instead of only providing data, the Highlights section gives you more context about those statistics and what the numbers mean.

Tapping the “Show All Highlights” button on the summary view brings you to a new page where you can tap specific metrics to see highlights for each category. These highlights provide more information about how a certain metric compares to the previous week and whether you are on track to perform as usual on a given day.

For example, the highlights page for the steps metric told me that I was walking less than usual by this point in the day, and that yesterday I had walked nearly 3,000 steps more than the previous day. It provides similar insights based on the week, month, or year.

The current Health app also displays data based on the day, week, month, or year, but it does not draw conclusions from the data the way the new version does.

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A new metric for hearing health

Apple is also adding two new data metrics, one of which introduces the ability to keep track of whether you may be listening to music too loudly.

Like other metrics, the new hearing health statistic is broken down by day, week, month, and year. The app displays whether your audio exposure was “OK” or “loud” during these periods, with “OK” defined by sounds below 80 decibels and anything above 80 decibels classified as “loud”. Long-term exposure to sounds below 80 decibels is safe and should not affect your hearing, the app says, while prolonged exposure to loud sounds above that threshold could lead to damage.

The app provides guidelines for listening to music or other audio at 80 decibels and higher, saying that you should only listen to music at 80 decibels for a maximum 40 hours a week, while audio at a volume of 90 decibels is only safe four hours per week.

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Apple says its measurement of headphone audio levels is most accurate if you are using headphones made by Apple or Beats, while audio played through other wired headphones or speakers can be estimated based on your phone’s volume.

Female health tracking

Third-party apps have long offered the ability for women to log their menstrual cycles and associated symptoms, but in iOS 13 this feature will be available by default.

The app can predict the days during which you might get your period, as well as the days it thinks you will definitely have it depending on the information you provide when setting up the feature. You can also log characteristics like your flow level and symptoms, making it easy to quickly share such information with a doctor if necessary.

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Overall, it’s a big improvement that could make the Apple Watch more tempting for fitness enthusiasts.

A fitness tracker is only as useful as the data you are able to get from it, and the improved Health app represents a notable step forward for Apple as a fitness-tracking platform.

The changes make it easier to see more information quickly and draw conclusions about your health and fitness. It’s too soon to tell whether Apple’s revamped Heath app succeeds ahead of competitors such as Fitbit, which has an intuitive app with a dashboard that shows important metrics in an easy-to-read grid. But it gives Apple crucial elements it had been missing.

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This article originally appeared on Business Insider .