Habits and Apple Health

Some habits are already measured by your phone. Sleep seven hours. Burn four hundred active calories. Walk for twenty minutes. Kept can read those measurements from Apple Health and check the habit in for you when you hit the target.

Turn it on

1. Connect Apple Health in Settings → Connections → Apple Health on your iPhone, and allow the categories Kept asks for.
2. Open a habit that is something you do, not something you are stopping, and find Check in from Apple Health in its editor. Tap Set up, or Manage if a rule already exists.
3. Choose the measurement: Time asleep in hours, Active energy in kilocalories, or Walking workout in minutes.
4. Enter an At least target and turn the rule on.

For a new habit, choose Set up Apple Health after saving. Kept saves the habit first and then opens its Health settings. A habit written in the plainest form, such as "Sleep 7 hours" or "Walk 20 minutes", prefills the measurement and target; you still decide whether to turn the rule on.

The Mac can manage these settings and read the resulting check-ins, but only the iPhone reads Apple Health.

How Kept decides

The comparison is arithmetic, not a model. Kept reads the measurement for the day and compares it with your target. Sleep belongs to the morning you woke up. Walking minutes count walking workouts on an enabled day, not steps or exercise-ring minutes. A missing, empty, or denied reading stays unknown; it never becomes a zero and never undoes a check-in you made yourself.

Automatic check-ins follow the habit's schedule and never apply to an avoidance habit.

Read the explanation

On Today, a habit that was checked in this way shows Checked in from Apple Health beneath it. Tap it to see the measurement, the target, the habit day, when it was observed, and the time zone where Kept has it. Undo automatic check-in stops automatic check-ins for that habit on that day, even after another sync; a check-in you made yourself stays. Turning the rule off in its settings stops future automatic actions and keeps the days already recorded.

On Mac the same sheet shows the reading behind that day's check-in and, when it can, how old the reading is. Apple Health check-ins never send a notification. A habit must be active, and not something you avoid, to take a Health rule.

Limits worth knowing

• Deleting a walk in Apple Health does not clear that day's walking check-in yet. Use Undo on the habit.
• A calorie deficit is not a Health measurement, so Kept will not check a habit in from meals or active energy in its place.
• A sleep score is not time asleep. Only time asleep counts.
• If a workout is missing, check Apple's own permission path: Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices › Kept.

Next: Goals.