Apple disables blood glucose monitoring for UK and Australian Health app users
Apple is disabling the blood glucose tracking feature of its Health app due to measurement problems reported by users in the UK and Australia. According to CNET, Apple is releasing a software patch to disable this feature until a subsequent update is available to fix the issue.
As described in an Apple support document, the issue involves both the units of measurement used to monitor glucose levels in diabetics and how it is handled by the Health app.
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.
This glitch becomes an issue for UK and Australia diabetics, who measure blood glucose in mmol/L . They will have difficulty in entering and displaying this critical health parameter in Apple's iOS 8 Health app.
Instead of allowing users to flounder, Apple temporarily is disabling the feature to prevent confusion and frustration among affected users, while it develops a permanent fix.
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.
These updates will affect only Apple's Health app. Apple confirmed that third-party apps will continue to use the available HealthKit APIs to store blood glucose data in either unit of measurement.
