This is the one thing I hope Samsung fixes with its big Samsung Health update

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I’ve spent the past week battling the flu, with my body giving what I can only describe as a half-hearted fight. Laughing often caused coughing fits, my breathing resembled wind whistling through canyons, and I spent the majority of the time in bed or propped up on the couch.

Yet through this all, my Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 pushed me to meet my activity goals and greeted my long periods of sleep with a frown in the Samsung Health app. That’s why when I read about the updates coming to Samsung Health, the ability to turn my data into meaningful insights is at the top of my wishlist.

It would be one thing if my smartwatch simply couldn’t track the metrics Samsung needed to tell that I was ill. But the data is all there. When I scoured through my sleep records, the app showed differences in my heart rate variability (HRV), greater fluctuations in my skin temperature, and an increased resting heart rate.

I use my Galaxy Watch for sleep tracking because it offers the most accurate metrics among the locally available brands I’ve tried. The watch and app noticed I was sleeping a lot more — an increase from my usual eight to nine hours to over 10. There was also a decrease in deep sleep. But the app couldn’t transform this into meaningful insights.

Days into my illness, it eventually flagged something. The app said that I was likely stressed (based on my HRV) and that I should practice mindfulness. That same night, it also prompted me to try to meet my activity goals at 11 pm. Thanks, Samsung, but I was planning on getting into bed.

When I finally started feeling better and was rediscovering the joys of breathing through my nose, the app congratulated me on managing my stress. It noted that my HRV had returned to its normal range. It’s strange that this data was attributed only to stress and nothing else. When my colleague Rita was ill, her Oura Ring 4 detected she was sick and used changes in her HRV as one of its data points.

I know to essentially ignore my smartwatch when it pushes me to do more when I’m not feeling well. But it’s still annoying to get notifications that you didn’t meet your goals. I also know plenty of people who don’t slow down when they feel ill — and these kinds of notifications would just add to the pressure to keep going.