Apple Watch Series 10 temperature readings: How to find them

I recently showed you how the new Vitals feature in watchOS 11 can help you predict when you’ll get sick. This is not a feature that Apple is promoting for the Apple Watch Series 10 or any other Apple Watch model that can measure vitals. Still, users have found that some of the vital signs trends the watch collects are reliable predictors of disease.

Vitals tracks up to five health parameters depending on the region and whether you activate some of them: heart rate, breathing rate, wrist temperature, blood oxygen and sleep duration. Blood oxygen is a feature that Apple cannot use due to a patent dispute in the US. Wrist temperature is a feature that requires you to set up a sleep focus every night.

The latter turns the Apple Watch Series 10, Series 9 and Series 8 into a kind of thermometer. However, there is a major problem with this approach. Apple isn’t willing to promote the Apple Watch as a thermometer, so you can’t use it as a thermometer if you think you have a fever.

In addition, the Health app does not display regular temperature values. Instead, the watch shows you a baseline and then tells you the differences between each night.

However, you can see the actual temperature values ​​that Apple Watch models with temperature sensors register. All you need is the iPhone paired with this watch.

Before we begin, I’ll repeat what I said above. You can’t take your temperature at any time with your Apple Watch Series 10, but you can take heart rate measurements, ECG measurements, and blood oxygen saturation tests.

You need to let the Apple Watch Series 10 take readings on its own while you sleep.

I’ve already explained how to enable wrist temperature measurements for the Vitals feature in watchOS 11. In short, you need to track your sleep, set a Sleep Focus mode for at least five nights to establish a baseline temperature, and then continue using Sleep Focus mode to get new readings every day.

You can check the Vitals app on your Apple Watch or the Vitals sections in the Health and Fitness apps on iPhone for temperature information. If you do this you will get something like this:

This isn’t great if you want to see regular readings. It simply shows you how your wrist temperature changes each night relative to your baseline. And you don’t get a metric for that baseline.

Here I will show you two ways to check the actual temperature values. The first option is based on the Health app on your iPhone, which collects all health data:

• Open the Health app on your iPhone
• Tap Browse Option in the bottom bar
• Tap Body measurements Menu
• Knock Wrist temperature
• Scroll down until you see Show all data
• Tap any of the items in the list to view the metrics

It turns out that the Apple Watch Series 10 records actual temperature. It checks wrist and surface temperatures before giving you a reading.

There’s an even better way to do the same. Third-party apps like Gentler Streak may display graphs of this data in menus like Wellbeing. This is typical of Gentler Streak, which I use to track health data.

As you can see below, these apps give you an actual graph with the temperatures extracted from the Health app.

Are these measurements reliable? Here too, the Apple Watch is not yet a thermometer. You can check your temperature at any time at night to see if it matches what the clock tells you.

Although the readings may differ from the temperature readings you take elsewhere on your body, I trust this trend line. Observing continuous changes in wrist temperature trend could help us predict an impending cold or flu and prepare accordingly.