Image credit: Apple
Apple is overhauling the Health app on every supported iPhone and Apple Watch, and the update arrives free on September 14. You don't need this year's new Apple Watch Ultra 4 or Series 12 to get most of it: watchOS 27 runs on Apple Watch Series 9 and later, Apple Watch SE 3 ($249), and Apple Watch Ultra 2 and later, paired with an iPhone 11 or newer running iOS 27.
The most noticeable change is a new Insights tab in the Health app, which pulls your heart, sleep, fitness, vitals, and cycle-tracking data into one summary, which updates through the day instead of making you dig through separate charts to see how you're doing. Alongside it, a new Longevity tab tracks how those numbers trend over months and years and introduces a Health Age score, comparing your measured fitness and vitals against your chronological age. Apple frames Health Age as a wellness indicator meant to show whether habits like sleep and exercise are moving your metrics in the right direction, and stops short of calling it a diagnostic tool.
Image credit: Apple
Apple is also adding Movement Evaluations, which use your iPhone's camera to walk you through an at-home assessment of flexibility, strength, balance, and estimated VO2 max, the same measure gyms and doctors use to gauge cardiovascular fitness.
For a more comprehensive look at your health, you can add your lab test results into the new Labs feature. Labs lets you schedule and pay for blood tests covering more than 50 biomarkers, including LDL cholesterol level and A1C for average blood sugar levels, through Quest Diagnostics. The test costs $119 and the results will feed directly back into the Health app once they're ready.
One of the most consequential changes is aimed at a group Apple – and every other health tracker company – has mostly ignored until now: for users 40 and older, watchOS 27 can flag possible perimenopause based on changes to your logged cycle pattern. Most women don't know they're in perimenopause because it happens gradually over years. The new Health app will let you know if your logged cycle and the symptoms might show the beginning of perimenopause. And it lets you log perimenopause and menopause symptoms directly, including a specific alert if bleeding occurs after menopause has been recorded. This is a long overdue update for an important stage of women's health.
Apple Watch itself will get a handful of smaller changes alongside the Health app. A new dynamic app grid surfaces icons for the five apps Siri predicts you'll want next (instead of the fixed grid Apple Watch has used for years), and a new tap gesture lets you open a widget straight from the Smart Stack. A redesigned Find My app folds Find Devices, Find Items, and Find People into one place, so you're no longer switching between separate apps to locate your phone, AirTags, and family members.
To get all of this, update your iPhone to iOS 27 first (Settings, General, Software Update). Then, once watchOS 27 is available on September 14, open the Watch app on your iPhone, tap General, then Software Update, and install it. The redesigned Health app itself requires an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro models and iPhone 16 and later); Health Age specifically also requires an Apple Watch, since it draws on watch-measured vitals.
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