Gyroscope Health Will Revamp Your Life's Operating System
We live busy lives, and it's hard to balance productivity with good health and fitness. Keeping track of how much screen time we're spending, as well as how diligently we are meeting our fitness goals, can be a true challenge. Gyroscope Health is a full-featured app that can monitor your life for you, keeping track of sleep, health, fitness, and even productivity.
App Feels Like
App Feels Like
If you're trying to keep up with balancing your life between productivity and good health and fitness, Gyroscope Health can really help. The app tracks your days, weeks, months and years in precise detail. Depending on which other apps you integrate with, Gyroscope Health can bring together your sleep patterns, productivity, fitness activities, and Apple Health data.
By itself, Gyroscope Health will report what it reads from Apple Health. That means, of course, that you need to grant it access to that data. The app really begins to shine, though, when you take advantage of the other available integrations.
For example, linking Gyroscope Health with RescueTime will help you visualize how you spend your computer and other screen time. This brings productivity to light, along with your fitness and health information.
The ultimate health and fitness tracking app
The Good
Gyroscope Health produces gorgeous reports that show you each day at a glance. You can view this information in cards, which you can tap on for even more information.
The information is presented to you in a way that makes it easy to see how well you are meeting your productivity, sleep, health, and fitness goals. Integrating with fitness wearables like the Fitbit and apps like Runkeeper will help you stay on track with your workout schedule.
Gyroscope Health also tracks your sleep patterns, pulling in data from Apple Health. You can see how much sleep you've gotten, along with the other important aspects of your day.
The reports provided are gorgeous and fit for sharing. As is fitting, each of the cards for the reports can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, Messages, or other options.
The Bad
There honestly isn't much bad about Gyroscope Health. The app works very well, and provides you with an excellent overview of your life. How much information it shows is entirely up to you and which other apps you allow it to integrate with.
There are a few areas for improvement, though. The app's "quantified selfie" option is terrific, but it might be good for the occasional reminder to take those snapshots. It would also be helpful if the app used a special album within Photos, rather than looking at your entire Photo Stream.
Being able to remove cards from the daily view would be a welcome change. I don't plan on integrating with RescueTime, so seeing that empty card every day is a bit off-putting. If it's too annoying seeing that blank card, Gyroscope Health chief technology officer Mahdi Yusuf says, "You can always switch to Simple mode. In Simple mode, empty data isn't displayed at all."
More integration with Apple Watch would also be appreciated. While the app does a great job of reflecting health information tracked by your Apple Watch, I wasn't able to find a way to integrate Workout data in the same way that the integration with Runkeeper and other fitness wearables works.
The Verdict
Gyroscope Health is definitely my app of choice for viewing my day at a glance. I've yet to integrate RescueTime into the mix, because I'm honestly distrustful of that service for some reason. Be that as it may, being able to see my sleep, health and fitness information in a single location each day is definitely a boon to my efforts to improve my physical fitness. Gyroscope Health is one of those apps that I use on a daily basis, and I believe most health- or fitness-conscious people will, too.
