Apple’s new Health app appears to track everything measurable about the body — sleep patterns, blood alcohol content, heart rate, inhaler usage, times fallen, you name it.
Via the sensors on my iPhone, Health charts the stairs I climb and steps I take without me asking. There is even a category called the “peripheral perfusion index,” which I’ve learned is the strength of one’s pulse.
But the app doesn’t yet offer a way for women to track their menstrual cycles, something that many health professionals consider essential.
You may ask, “So what?” There’s plenty of menstrual and fertility tracking apps out there. Surely, Apple’s Health app doesn’t have to do it all.
But Health aims to be a composite profile of one’s health and fitness, a dashboard of data and analysis. The vision is that Health will pull information from an ecosystem of wellness apps still being built as well as data one enters, all of which will help answer the doctor’s question, “How are you doing?”
“Menstrual history is definitely a key health measure for women,” said Dr. Lynn Marie Westphal, an associate professor in obstetrics and gynecology at Stanford University Medical Center. “A lot of diseases will manifest as abnormalities of menstrual cycles.”
Since it was introduced in September, the Health app has been under fire for this apparent oversight, becoming part of the ongoing discussion of whether the gender gap among tech employees affects the industry’s products and services.
I doubt Apple engineers and product designers purposely excluded female users, although I think it’s worth pointing out that the company’s global workforce is 70 percent male. It’s also worth noting that there’s no indication the app was geared for men, although that has not raised as many concerns. Apple didn’t respond to my request for comment.
But Health may be like a lot of mobile health tracking apps that stumble in the design department because they rely on misperceptions of how certain groups might use them, and experts in this area tell me this is a very common problem when it comes to women.
“Women are rarely imagined as potential users of a new technology,” said Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Apple Health invites users to identify their sex, but its many other categories are gender neutral as far as I can detect. There are neither questions about prostate checkups, nor questions about fertility cycles and breast lump checks.
And that is common with health tracking apps, which often try to make the product gender neutral without a way to customize it. But that’s a problem.
“A truly useful health app for women would account for the stuff that women actually need to track,” said Elissa Shevinsky, chief technology officer at Glimpse, a group messaging company that targets teens.
Of course, women don’t want their apps to play to stereotypes, with flowers, butterflies and unicorn art.
Women “want the same high-quality user experience they get from other utility-based apps, like a calendar,” said Lisa Kennelly of Clue, which offers an app to track menstrual cycles.
And there are some app design issues that transcend gender, such as whether the app assumes the user will always carry their smartphones, which can then quietly collect data on a person’s movement.
It’s early days for Apple Health. We don’t know what it will become as app developers clamor to be part of it. For example, Ovatemp, an ovulation thermometer that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone app to help women chart their ovulation cycles, is working to gain Apple’s approval to be part of the Health ecosystem, said Alex Moazed, founder and chief executive of Applico, which invests and works with app companies.
As Apple Health is built, it needs to think of not just of all the cool features and obscure data it can collect about the human body. It also should think of being useful to both men and women.
And tracking basic female health data like menstrual cycles will have to be part of it.
Contact Michelle Quinn at 510-394-4196 and mquinn@mercurynews.com. Follow her at twitter.com/michellequinn.
