I was widowed in December 2018 and this made me think about health. In early 2019 I found I had dangerously high blood pressure. This is now all corrected with a daily Perindopril tablet.
I loved being married so in autumn 2019 I used a number of dating apps to find a new partner. I successfully found someone and we’re planning on being a family. But… along comes 2020 and we’ve now got a new threat of Covid-19 that has isolated us in different countries.
So the goal is to stay alive and not get caught out again by preventable or correctable diseases. The virus can impact many different organs but the one that’s been in the news is lungs either directly or by secondary infections of pneumonia. Lungs get oxygen into the blood stream so logically if your blood oxygen is normal then you are probably not at risk. You may still be an asymptomatic carrier or you just haven’t hit the viral load to have the disease. By understanding your normal SpO2 and tracking any change then in principle you have an early warning of a problem.
So I bought an Honor band 5 fitness watch as it is one of the cheapest fitness watches with SpO2 readings. I also bought one for my new girlfriend – I lost my wife and I don’t want to lose anyone else. After testing my watch for a week I sent her one and she now sends me her sleep quality data. It’s not a competition but her sleep points is far better than mine!
Behind the scenes it is an Huawei product. That interested me as I was curious how the company was handling the childish US restrictions. The root cause of the restrictions is guaranteed to be gone by 2024.
So that aside, here are the quirks to look for,
- Dates will be in a mixture of MM/DD and DD/MM. This is strange given regional date format is such a ubiquitous string function.
- In a similar way the week starts on Sunday and this can’t be adjusted.
- When you sleep for less than 3 hours it views that as a nap but if you then subsequently sleep for more than 3 hours it correctly turns the nap into part of your night sleep and joins the two with the period in between as being “Awake”.
- The sleep data sync is updated automatically when you look at the sleep panel on the app.
- I have fallen asleep at a desk watching my computer and it has recorded that as a nap. I don’t know how the watch does this but the nap and sleep detection seems to be very good.
- If your phone has updated the sleep data but not steps, pulse or SpO2, then that is probably due to the app needing to be exited and started. On Android you go to the list of running apps and close the Health app and then run it again. No data is lost.
- You can trigget a manual sync by going into the app Me -> Settings -> Sync which is at the top of the settings. If the data has not updated after a manual sync, then exit the app and run it again.
- If after app re-installation (e.g. you changed your phone) and the sleep sync gets to, for example, 77%, and doesn’t go on to 99% and only shows naps then you may have a software inconsistency between your watch and the phone. Assuming the phone app is up to date, you must reset your watch (More -> System -> Reset). You will lose all data on the watch and will have to reconnect to your phone and reload your watch faces if you had changed that.
The language on the watch changes automatically based on your phone language and updates automatically. I have tested English, Italian and Hungarian.