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How to setup Medical ID with iOS 8’s Health app

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The new Health app in iOS 8 allows users to track their activity, calories and more. With HealthKit, third-party apps can share data with each other, letting users see a more complete picture of their health.

Past all of this, Health brings something long-needed to iOS: Medical ID.

For the uninitiated, a Medical ID is a tag, bracelet or some other item that contains vital information if the owner is in an accident or unable to respond or communicate. I wear a waterproof one when cycling, and my son wears one sharing critical facts about his situation that an EMT or other medical professional may need to know if no one can communicate to them.

Related to a Medical ID are ICE — “in case of emergency” — contacts. While some people may preface contacts with “ICE” to show that they are the ones who should be called in case of an incident, this system (or any third-party apps that mimic it) isn’t accessible if an iPhone is locked.

With iOS 8’s Health app, Apple’s put this information in a place that can be accessible on a locked iPhone, just two taps away from the PIN code screen:

Adding this information is very simple. If you open the new Health app, and tap last tab at the bottom — named “Medical ID” — information and a headshot can be entered easily and quickly.

The Medical ID screen shows all the information inputted in Health app’s Medical ID section, including:

  • Name
  • Photo
  • Birthdate
  • Medical Conditions
  • Medical Notes
  • Allergies & Reactions
  • Medications
  • Emergency contacts
  • Blood type
  • Organ donor status
  • Weight
  • Height

Contacts can be called from this screen, regardless of if the iPhone is locked or not. This means your spouse, parent or sibling can be contacted as long as your iPhone is intact. My wife and I both filled ours out, and as easy as it is, there’s no real reason not to do so.

A history of Apple.com’s navigation⇢

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James Dempsey:

The content of the tabs shows an interesting progression as well. The Apple logo, Store, and Support tabs are a common thread throughout with Search appearing surprisingly late in the game in 2007. These unchanging outer items are like bookends around the changing world of Apple over time.

For the first seven years, the inner tabs mainly focused on software (QuickTime, Mac OS X, iTunes) and different incarnations of online services (iReview, iCard, iTools which became .Mac). The first hardware to appear on a tab was iPod, but it had to share a tab with iTunes for almost seven years before getting a tab of its own.

September: The First Lady comes to Memphis⇢

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Instead of running RSS sponsorships this month, I’m raising $10,000 in support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as part of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Click here to learn more and donate.

Jackson Baker:

A child asked: Would she be willing to do a selfie with the patient group? “We’ll do a self-ie, an us-sie, a you-sie, a we-sie, whatever you guys want to do,” Michelle Obama answered.

And, at the end of her chat with the patients and their parents, she did just that, posing for a group portrait.

For something like an hour on Wednesday, in front of a watching and fascinated press corps who had waited a good two hours for her late plane to arrive, she had supplied the children of St. Jude with something beyond the well-known state-of-the-art treatment and the committed care-giving of the famous institution.

She turned the place into a kind of Camelot, all right — right here in Memphis, Tennessee.

This sort of national attention — no matter how fleeting — is great for the hospital. However, perhaps more importantly, these kids and their parents have memories of this visit that will become part of their family story.

Stories that should be bigger than cancer.

Apple publishes Privacy statement⇢

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The letter from Tim Cook is great, but maybe the best line of this whole mini-site is this:

On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8.

Amazon updates Kindle line

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The Kindle Voyage is the Paperwhite’s replacement. With a glass-covered, flush-mounted 300ppi display and new — and seemingly better — controls to turn pages, this is my next Kindle.

(Condolences to the Paperwhite sitting on my night stand as I type this.)

The Paperwhite is still around, but is now the middle tier, siting above a new $69 model that sports physical page-turn buttons and a touch screen, but no backlight.

Amazon’s tinkered with their tablet line as well, but the only mildly interesting one is the $149 Fire HD Kids Edition. Dieter Bohn at The Verge explains:

Amazon’s cavalcade of tablet announcements this evening includes a surprisingly good offer to parents. It’s the Fire HD Kids Edition. Essentially, the Kids Edition is a standard Kindle Fire HD tablet — at either the 6-inch or 7-inch size — with a pile of add-on features that are designed for kids and the havoc they tend to wreak. You pay a $50 premium over the standard version, which amounts to $149 for the 6-inch version and $189 for the 7-inch base model. But for that $50 you get a few special bonuses. The first is a one-year subscription to Amazon FreeTime Unlimited, the company’s set of kid-friendly content that includes 5,000 games, videos, and books. You also get a gigantic case that protects the tablet and makes it easier for small children to hold. Last but certainly not-least is a 2-year, no-questions-asked warranty. Amazon representatives all but intimated that your child could put it in a blender — just send the busted bits back and Amazon will send you a new one.

For many non-nerd parents this thing might be a real winner. It — along with all of these other devices — occupy Amazon’s homepage. With the promise of “If they break it, we’ll replace it. No questions asked,” I can’t help but think this will tempt at least dozens of parents out of buying an iPad mini this Christmas.

Tapbots, on iOS 8⇢

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Tapbots:

Since iOS8 was released this week, we wanted to give you a quick update on where we are with things. Tweetbot 3 for the iPhone will be submitted soon. We are finishing up our work fixing bugs and optimizing features for iOS8 and also want to test on the new devices before submitting. This will be a free update for Tweetbot 3 customers.

Next, we wanted to state that Tweetbot 3 for the iPad is in development.

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Jason Snell looks back at Macworld’s print history⇢

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The Power Slider, over on The Verge:

Before there were tech web sites there were magazines. Once a month you’d get a new one and read it cover to cover, including all the ads, trying to glean as much information as you could. I remember scouring issues of MacUser before buying my first PowerBook, trying to decide which model was exactly right for me. I must’ve read that article fifty times.

Imagine that. Back then, Apple would announce a raft of new products and almost nobody would know for weeks or even months. Now we all know in seconds.

Don’t miss the awesome collection of Macworld covers. Good stuff.

It’s iOS 8 Day

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Today, iOS 8 arrived, riding on a cloud of free bits and white UI elements. I’ll be rounding up links here all day.

Day One warns users about iCloud Drive⇢

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This is affecting a lot of developers, not just Day One. This could have been avoided if Yosemite was shipping with iOS 8 tomorrow. I imagine a lot of users are going to think things are broken because they didn’t understand iOS 8’s on-boarding screens.