CardioBot 4.0 is out and it’s the best heart-tracking app for Apple Watch I’ve used

CardioBot 4.0 for iPhone and Apple Watch is now available. If you’re serious about discovering notable patterns concerning your heart rate and getting useful tips, hints and recommendations that can improve your lifestyle and quality of life, CardioBot has probably been the best heart-tracking app on App Store—and the latest 4.0 update makes it even better.

Your Apple Watch measures your heart rate every four minutes during the day, but making sense of that data beyond Apple’s built-in heart notifications can be very challenging.

True, you can see more heart stats in the Health app, but the fact remains that Apple has not really bothered to allow customers to explore and mine their heart rate data for other insights.

That’s what specialized apps like CardioBot are for.

Created by Majid Jabrayilov, this app does a lot of things right with its smart interface and a powerful data analysis engine. CardioBot gives you detailed monthly heart rate statistics along with daily averages, summaries and analysis of your heart rate variability.

In its most recent update released earlier this week, CardioBot has picked up new analysis sections related to walking, sitting and using mindful apps like Apple’s Breathe app.

Additionally, CardioBot 4.0 packs in new sleep and workout quality metrics and sports a brand new recommendation engine that analyzes your heart metrics to deliver personalized hints on improving them. Moreover, the previous sleep and workout stats now use a new scoring system in order to help you understand how well you’ve worked out or slept.

“This is also covered by our recommendation system, which is going to give you some tips on your exercise and sleep improvements,” Majid wrote. CardioBot integrates with the Health app which lets it analyze workout, meditation and sleep data captured by other apps.

On the Apple Watch front, CardioBot 4.0 now supports the Siri watch face and provides a specialized workout mode that can be started from the watchOS app to get real-time heart rate analysis during a ​workout, which is especially cool.

Since this is CadioBot’s biggest release ever, Majid penned a blog post which covers the story of the app’s development and building the new features included in this update. Go read the full post if you’re interested, but please consider the following passage:

I was an active smoker three years ago. I wanted to quit smoking, but I needed the right motivation. That is why I built CardioBot to visualize my heart rate decrease during this period of my life. And it works. I quit smoking and my heart rate improved. CardioBot has become a full-featured heart rate analyzer during that time.

Right now, CardioBot is able to analyze your daily heart rate, track your sleep quality, detect your workouts and find how good it was, how long was fat burning during the exercise. I’ve also implemented heart rate variability analysis, which brings the opportunity to plan hard workouts by analyzing body health.

This is very relevant to yours truly. As someone who has been an active smoker up until two years ago, I relied on apps like CardioBot to visualize the negative effects of smoking on my heart rate, which in turn made a really positive difference for my efforts to quit smoking.

If you’re still wondering whether or not you need CardioBot, read this:

Many of my users are suffering from Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. They use CardioBot to monitor when they need to stop and rest. They also share information displayed by CardioBot with their doctors because it’s the cleanest and most comfortable to use and read than any other app they have tried.

To learn more about CardioBot, visit the official website.

On a more personal note, I think Majid has made quite an effort to turn CardioBot 4.0 into a good citizen on Apple’s software platforms: 4.0 brings rich support for VoiceOver technology so now people with vision problems can use the app without any issues.

And before I sing off, it pays to underscore that CadioBot is an incredibly powerful yet accessible app. I still can’t believe it has been developed by a single-person team.

Majid is basically a one-man show, but that didn’t stop him from talking to cardiologists in order to ensure that his new recommendations engine does come up with personalized tips and hints on improving your cardiovascular health.

As I said before, the new recommendation system covers the new analysis types (sedentary, walking and meditation heart rate) and it all works just by wearing Apple Watch.

That kind of stuff is usually in the domain of corporations like Apple with big development budgets which employ scientists and doctors to work on their health efforts. With that in mind, it’s even more remarkable that CardioBot has leapfrogged Apple’s own heart-tracking features.

CardioBot is available on AppStore for $2.99.