This is Technology Bytes, episode 166 for May 10th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
I believe I’ve talked about this subject before, or at least danced around it a little bit.
This week I want to talk about the Apple Watch and its health app and how I use it and its impact.
And this was a kind of a difficult week physically for me.
Nothing was particularly wrong, and I didn’t necessarily feel bad.
Well, that may not be true.
I think I was feeling a little bad, but I was still able to do all the things that I do on a normal basis.
My walks, my workouts, my work, job, and then, you know, spending the evenings enjoying time with my wife.
And, you know, I have a lot of data that the Apple Watch is taking concerning my health, and I look at it quite a bit.
And then I have additional apps on my phone that tell me when to drink water.
I track my calories.
There’s a lot I do with health coming on the Apple Watch and the data that it provides me.
But I want to talk about one aspect of that in particular for this week.
I wear an Apple Watch all the time, and so I have two watches so that when I need to charge one, I can wear the other one.
I have an Apple Watch Ultra 3.
That is the one I wear almost all the time.
And I have an older version 7.
I think version is not the right word there.
Series 7 watch that I wear when I need to get my other watch charged up so that I can put it back into practice.
But one of the apps that is checking on my health when I’m sleeping is called the Vitals app.
And in that app, it measures a number of things.
It measures the wrist temperature.
It measures our respiratory rate.
It measures our heart rate.
It measures blood oxygen, and it measures our sleep duration.
I rarely hear from the Vitals app in my normal days.
Occasionally, I’ll get sick and have a cold or something like that in the wintertime or maybe a summer cold.
And so I will see something pop up in my Vitals app that tells me that I’m out of the normal.
Well, this week, this past week, I don’t think I had a cold.
I’m not exactly sure what was wrong with me.
But the one morning when I woke up, I did all my workouts.
And then as I was sitting eating breakfast, my watch taps me on the wrist and says, Hey, your wrist temperature was high.
Your respiratory rate was high.
And your heart rate was high for last night’s sleep activities.
And so I kind of ignored it, trying to figure out maybe why.
I know I didn’t sleep very well that night.
And so I just kind of went on with my day.
And then the next morning when I got up, I still had a heart rate, elevated heart rate.
And when I say elevated, it’s just above the normal.
My heart rate is relatively low.
I had been noticing that because I do a breathe activity at least three times a day just to try to relax.
And when you do that on the watch, it gives you a heart rate while you were doing that breathing.
And generally, I like to see my heart rate be somewhere in the high 50, low 60 kind of numbers.
And it was in the high 60s, low 70s kind of numbers.
And I was like, that just doesn’t feel right.
And I don’t feel bad, but I don’t understand what’s going on.
But my watch was also telling me that overnight my heart rate was elevated above what were normal.
And also my respiratory rate.
The second night, I didn’t get a wrist temperature notification, but just the other two, respiratory rate and heart rate.
And then this morning, as I’m eating my breakfast, there’s a note from my Apple Watch Health that says, hey, you have had an elevated respiratory rate for the last five days.
And so it actually reset my norm for my respiratory rate.
And so it went from like 17 breaths a minute, I think is how they rate that, to 19 breaths per minute.
And then it was saying, you know, that number goes up when you’re exercising, obviously goes down when you’re sleeping.
And this is just kind of a baseline that we notice to see if there’s anything odd.
The watch knows when I’m exercising, so it’s not going to alarm me for a respiratory rate increase because, hey, when you’re exercising, you’re breathing faster.
And your heart rate goes up and your wrist temperature goes up.
And so I was just kind of continuing to ignore them.
But one thing I did notice is that on Monday when things were first alarmed, and still nothing really wrong, but I was not really paying that much attention.
But as I was looking back, I’m like, okay, I’m not sleeping as well.
My sleep score is quite low.
And I’m having to get up in the middle of the night more than I normally would to use the restroom.
I’m old.
It happens.
But nothing felt exactly off.
But through the week, I could feel myself feeling better.
My walks were slow on Monday and Tuesday, even when I was trying to go fast.
My workouts in those mornings were also more difficult than I usually experience.
And so I knew that something was a little bit off, but nothing necessarily really wrong.
So then as we went on the week, in fact, today on Saturdays, I do, well, I record on Saturdays as published for Sunday.
But on Saturdays, I do a five-mile walk.
So much farther than my three-mile normal walk.
And I also jog a little bit more on those days.
But on Saturday, I did a relatively good pace, more than I had done the Saturday before, faster.
Faster than I had done all week in my normal walks.
So I felt like I was doing a little bit better.
And then my HIIT workout after my walk also felt a little bit better.
So it’s interesting because the Vitals app was actually telling me, hey, you might be aware that something’s wrong.
Not necessarily that I need to change anything, but just be aware that your body is talking to you.
And so I find that to be fascinating.
I don’t always look at the data that the watch provides in the health realm.
I should probably pay a little more attention.
And maybe now that I’ve had these types of warnings, I may pay a little more attention to how I’m feeling and what are the measurements say that my watch is actually taking.
And all in all, yeah, I’m glad I have it.
The Apple Watch has done wonders for my health.
I’ve been walking for years and years and years now where before I was getting limited exercise because, you know, my days of team sports and those types of things were over.
And it has really done a lot to keep me in a state of some form of physical health.
And I appreciate the fact that it tells me when things are not normal and allows me to look back, not necessarily to scare me, not necessarily for me to be, you know, a hypochondriac, but just to react to what my body’s doing.
And I think that is what Apple Health is all about.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions or questions, you can send them to technologybytesatmericfamily.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.
