Apple Disables Blood Glucose Measurement To Save Confusion In Australia

After a problematic roll-out for Apple’s Health app at the launch of iOS 8, Apple has encountered another speed bump on the road, this time with blood glucose measurement figures and confusion for Australian users.

The problem is that different countries measure blood glucose levels in different ways. In Australia, we measure in millimoles per litre, whereas the US measures in milligrams per deciliter. While Health for iOS 8 does support both types, devices that measure in millimoles per litre can’t have their values correctly converted into milligrams per deciliter in Health.

As a result, the Health app needs to be updated, which Apple plans to do shortly.

Here’s Apple’s full statement:

The Health app lets you manually enter and view blood glucose values in mg/dL (milligrams per deciliter). This unit of measurement is used by a number of countries, while some other countries use mmol/L (millimoles per liter).

HealthKit supports both units of measurement. However, if you measure your blood glucose using a device that displays mmol/L, those values can’t be manually entered or displayed in the Health app with that unit of measurement.

To prevent confusion in countries where mmol/L is commonly used, we’ll soon release a software update that will temporarily remove the ability to manually enter and view blood glucose values in the Health app while we work on an update to support both units of measurement.

If you have previously entered values manually in the Health app, you’ll no longer see this data in the Health app after the update. However, your data won’t be deleted, and other apps with permission to read health data will still have access to blood glucose values that you previously entered.

Third-party apps will continue to be able to support both units of measurement and can continue to use HealthKit APIs to store blood glucose data.


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