Parsing Apple Health Data

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Hello all,

So, I recently got an admonishment from my MD about my bloodwork, and told it would be nice if I lost some weight to help handle some of the issues. So, I’ve been trying various things, but I also wouldn’t mind some metrics. Now, I’ve got some already; I just never really looked. I have been tracking in Apple Health with a scale since the end of 2012, so all of that data is in the Health app. I wanted to get it out of there (particularly weight data) and get it into a spreadsheet to juggle things around. I did an export and the resulting file was a 2 GIG xml file! Well, Excel took a look at it and ran away, so now I’m not sure where to go.

Does anyone know of a good way to get this data out so I can look at it? Thanks so much in advance for any thoughts.

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I think this app (HealthFit) does what you want. I originally bought it to sync with Strava but now use it for a good overview. It has several export options.

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I use an app call “Health Exporter” to export this kind of data:

(It can export 89 different categories, including weight)

Unfortunately it seems to be no longer available on the App Store?

(But there are plenty of other, similar apps, like the one suggested above)

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+1 for HealthFit. I have used it in the past and found it to be a great app. Not affiliated, just a happy user.

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The problem with using any exrtaction apps is that they lag behind the data stored by the Apple Health app. Some smart devices do not integrate well with Health, for example the Ultrahuman Ring Air app stores VO2max data but does not copy it to Health.

Equally there is a problem with extracting data from Health itself. None of the medication data it holds ever get extracted even by the export of those large nearly everything XML files. (My latest export is approaching 1Gb.)

There has been some discussion over in the QuantifiedSelf Discourse forum andthe r/quantifiedself subReddit about how to analysing XML exported data in a sensible fashion. Personally I think I would use python with pandas or R to parse the file and then copy the data to an SQL database for further analysis/backup. Then use something like Weka for that analysis.

The issue with the exported XML is that it contains everything ever added to Health (except for the above medication neglect). It cannot be subdivided by date (range) and while those extract apps do have date capabilities there remains the problem of what they do not extract.

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How much lag do you experience?

I just checked; even for something that’s updated frequently (heart rate, via Apple Watch), the lag seemed to be a couple of minutes.

Shouldn’t that be sufficient then for weight data?

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Thanks to you all for the suggestions. I downloaded HealthFit and I’m having a nose around it. Hopefully, it’ll give me what I need.

I think the issue is that I really do only need the weight data, so yeah, it’ll offer up more than I need, but I don’t mind that if I can just figure out how to work with the data.

I think it’s a miss on Apple’s part that you can’t natively just export chosen information to a CSV file. I’d have thought that would be a popular thing to do. Ah well.

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I have been a proud subscriber to Guava Health when I stumbled across it somehow… it imports data from many devices, including Apple Health, and connects with most health providers to directly import health records. The ones that do not directly connect I can upload CDA files for Guava to parse. I can pull up specific labs with no issue at all, and show my doctors trends, etc.
As someone who’s main doctor is an oncologist, but with many other doctors spread throughout various networks, this has been a real godsend in allowing me to have all of my data in one place.

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Sorry I meant that the capabilities of third party extractor apps lag behind in functionality (specifically the items they export) not that there was/is a (time)lag between an Apple Watch and the linked iPhone.