This is Technology Bytes, episode 114 for May 11, 2025.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I’m doing something a little bit different.
I’m going to talk about health, and in itself that doesn’t sound like technology at all, but I was thinking about the technology that we use, that people use, to improve their health or to track their health or to measure their health.
And for the most part I’m going to talk about what I do, and then maybe I’ll hear from somebody about what they do.
But I don’t know if I’m the most healthy person, but I do try to remain at some level of health.
I do quite a bit of walking, some other exercising.
I don’t necessarily always eat well, but I do track what I eat so that maybe at some point I could maybe eat better.
But the fact is that some years back, maybe 11, 10, 11, 12 years ago, I wasn’t necessarily overweight.
I’m 6'2", I weighed about 205 pounds, but I wasn’t thin, or I definitely wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t unhealthy.
I didn’t have anything that wasn’t affecting my ability to move and interact with people or to do some exercise, play some sports.
But at some point I thought, I probably need to be a little more active than I am, and all of it started with hardware.
And so I will talk about that next.
So it will come as an absolute surprise to no one that my hardware includes Apple gear.
And so I had an Apple Watch for some time, and I enjoyed wearing it, the technology of it was really cool.
And then I kind of stumbled into the health tracking features of the watch.
I’m not even sure what happened.
I think my wife also wanted to improve some health, and so we thought maybe we could start walking together.
And the Apple Watch had a way of tracking your walking and tracking your heartbeat while you walked and all kinds of things like that.
And so I kind of started there and really haven’t stopped.
It’s some number 10 plus years where every day I do some form of exercise that I track with the Apple Watch.
And then Apple came out with Apple Fitness Plus.
I actually covered that in a previous microcast.
And so another hardware thing that I use is my Apple TV.
And even though it’s not on my list, I also, I guess, use the TV in my living room because that’s what the Apple TV is connected to, so I can see the things that I want to do.
And so there’s lots of exercises there, high-intensity interval training.
There’s training with dumbbells.
There’s core work.
There’s many other types of exercises that can be tracked through that hardware device and on the TV.
And then the other thing is at some point, I don’t know how many years ago it was, but my wife joined or rejoined or signed back up for Weight Watchers.
And in that, they gave her a scale by Conair that is tied to the Weight Watchers app.
And so now we have a digital scale that tracks our weight, and I also use that hardware as part of my health initiative.
So the second thing that I use is a number of different apps on my phone and my watch to track my health activities.
Obviously, the Apple Health app does much of that work.
And even when it’s not the main device or main software that I use, every other app that I use talks to the Apple Health app.
And so all of my data from every app that I use to help with my health is in the Apple Health app database.
So I don’t have to go anywhere else to look at those kind of things.
Some of the things that I do with Apple Health tied to my Apple Watch is track my sleep.
Obviously, I use it to track all of my workouts.
There’s some meditation.
I don’t really use it for that, but there’s a Breathe app that I use regularly throughout the day just to keep myself calm.
I have some struggles with anxiety, and that really helps.
I try to track the food that I eat, and for the most part, I do it pretty well.
Sometimes it’s a little more difficult than others, and for that, I use MyFitnessPal.
I’ve tried a few other ones, but this one seems to have the best database, maybe most thorough database.
And so I use that to track my food.
Not sure I always get the calorie count right, but at least I know what I’m eating, even if I don’t put the amounts in there exactly correctly.
The other problem that I have is that I don’t pay for MyFitnessPal, so I don’t get the macro or micronutrients, so proteins and all those things.
I don’t really get that as tracking, and so maybe at some point I should maybe pay for something.
There’s another app, and I can’t remember the name of it.
My daughter had given it a try, and that’s what she uses because she can track all the nutrients then for that particular app and tracking her food, and so it just gives her a little better picture of her health.
So just a real quick look, and she uses an app called Cronometer or Cronometer.
I’m not sure the exact pronunciation, and that one allows her to track the nutrients.
It’s still free, but I find that you have to work really hard at putting your food in there because the library of foods that it has is a little bit limited.
But that is also a potential.
The other thing I use is WaterMinder, and so I put everything that I drink, not just water, but every liquid that I drink I put in that app, and that, of course, translates directly to the Apple Health app, and so that tracks all of my water consumption and other liquid consumption.
I drink soda.
I drink coffee.
I drink water.
I don’t drink any alcohol, so I don’t have to worry about that, I guess, but that app has been really good, and it reminds you to drink water, and so I really like that.
Oh, jumping backwards, I remember reminders.
My wife says if it wasn’t for my watch, I would die because it tells me when to breathe.
It tells me when to stand up.
It tells me when to go to sleep, so I also have that tracking in the Apple Health as well.
And then I use the Conair version of the Weight Watchers app even though I’m not signed up because when my wife got that digital scale, I could create an account for myself, and so I use that to track the weight, but that weight goes directly to the Apple Health, so I track that weight there as well and any fluctuations that happen.
So in that, I use those on the daily basis, sometimes to my detriment maybe.
My kids and my wife think I’m a little crazy, although my daughter is kind of joining me in that, and then we get to see things through that health data that helps us understand what our bodies are going through.
My daughter’s way better at that than I am, and she really looks at some of the finer details, but if I have to go to a doctor, I’m 62 years old, and so if I…
61?
I don’t know, something like that.
But if I have to go to a doctor, then having all of that data available can be very, very helpful.
So while health is not a technology in and of itself, I am one who uses the technology available to me to do my best to stay healthy.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have any comments or suggestions or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
