watchOS 11 public beta — I tried the new Apple Watch Vitals health app, here’s how it works and first impressions

Apple officially released the public beta of watchOS 11 this week, and I had the chance to load it up on my Apple Watch SE 2022 and take many of the new features for a spin.

We’ll soon publish explainers and personal takes on everything from pausing your Activity Rings to using the new women’s health tracking log, but first I wanted to take y’all on a little tour of the new Vitals health app.

Vitals app — how to try it now

Of course, you’re more than welcome to check out Vitals for yourself. The public beta is open to anyone who signs up and has a compatible device. Here’s how to download the watchOS 11 public beta to your own Apple Watch. It took me roughly an hour to download and install it.

Vitals app — finally, a unified health app

The Apple Watch has long been a great tool for keeping tabs on health and sleep quality but data points and insights have always been scattered across various apps. Or, most easily available from the iPhone Health app.

Apple looks to streamline things a bit with the new Vitals app where you can get a snapshot of all your key wellness metrics, monitored while you sleep, including average heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen levels (on compatible models), body temperature and sleep duration.

It takes a week of continuous wearing for the Vitals app to develop a baseline for the above metrics; tonight will be my first night of wrist-based analysis. Comically, I’m also testing the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 and its new AI-backed sleep-tracking features on my other wrist.

Once the Apple Watch figures out your averages, the Vitals app can be set up to alert you when health trends look out of whack or vary greatly from the norm.

Vitals app — how it works

Once baselines are locked down, users will be greeted with a morning report on their vitals from the previous night’s rest. In this report, the above metrics are classified as either “Typical” or an “Outlier.” These classifications are based both on your averages and on the typical range for someone your age.

Individual outlier data points won’t necessarily result in a health alert, but multiple vitals out-of-whack will, especially when they occur multiple nights in a row.

Vitals app — no fitness data

One thing that struck me as odd about the new Vitals app is a lack of fitness and workout data integration. Workouts and sleep quality are deeply intertwined and it seems like somewhat of an oversight to focus the Vitals app only on metics captured while sleeping. Also, details into sleep cycles are still only visible within the Sleep app.

I was also hoping the Vitals app would provide some sort of daily score that takes into account both the quality of my previous night’s rest and the intensity of the prior day’s physical activity, similar to Garmin’s Body Battery or Samsung’s Energy Score — but no dice.

That said, Apple has introduced something kind of similar in Training Loads, another new watchOS 11 feature that provides insights into how your workout intensity is impacting your fitness over time. However, it doesn’t appear that sleep data factors into training load.

Vitals app vs. Samsung Health app

I mentioned testing sleep tracking on Galaxy Watch 7 , and it’s worth noting that the Samsung Health app in Wear OS 5 provides a bevy of useful insights into your health after just one night of sleeping, including most of the same metrics the Vitals app records.

Which one is more accurate? Further testing is needed. Stay tuned as I wear far too many smartwatches to bed for the next week or so.

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