The HKAnchoredObjectQuery provides a useful way to keep tabs on what has changed for a particular sample type. It provides us with both the ability to receive a snapshot of data, and then on subsequent calls, a snapshot of what has changed. Alternatively you can create the initial snapshot of samples, and then continuously monitor as a long-running query which notifies you each time a new sample is added or when a sample is deleted.

For this tutorial we will continue on from an earlier tutorial, and add more functions that will allow us to test the HKAnchoredObjectQuery class. Go ahead and download the latest version of the project and open it in Xcode. [Read more…]

In the last tutorial we covered reading characteristic data from HealthKit. Characteristic data is read by accessing direct methods on the health store. These queries are simple because items like date of birth and biological sex do not typically change. However, there are many data types stored in Apple Health that do change such as step counts, heart rate, body mass, and so on. For these types of data Apple allows us to create queries so that we can fetch the data we want.

Many of your requests to HealthKit will be done by using a query. Queries allow you to fetch a snapshot of data from the HealthKit store. There are eight different types of queries that you have available to use with HealthKit. This tutorial will cover the HKSampleQuery. We will look at each other type of query in separate posts. [Read more…]

For todays tutorial we will look at reading characteristic data from HealthKit. This is one of several ways in which we can read data, with the other ways being queries and long-running queries. We will investigate queries and long-running queries at another time.

Direct method calls can be used to the HKHealthStore to read characteristic data. These items stored in HealthKit do not require a query to be made. These are characteristic types of data such as sex, date of birth, and blood type, to name a few. The reason for this is that these types of data do not change over time. For example, your birthday remains constant.

You can access characteristic data directly through the health store. In a previous tutorial we covered how to setup Apple HealthKit. We will continue on from this project, which you can download here.

In that previous tutorial we requested permissions for stepCount and biologicalSex. Out of these two, biologicalSex is the only one which is characteristic data. We will look at how we can request this data from Apple HealthKit. [Read more…]

In the final part of this tutorial series we will make some slight adjustments to the graph, and then provide the ability to record your weight in HealthKit.

You can either jump back to the beginning where we created a line graph with Paintcode, start on step 2, or begin here by downloading the project as we left it at the end of the last tutorial. [Read more…]