Making the most out of your Microsoft Band 2 with the Health Dashboard (video)

Posted by:Staff Writer
on

The Microsoft Health dashboard is a website that provides a powerful and versatile way to manage and analyze all the health data observed by devices such as your smartphone or Microsoft Band products. You can access the website at dashboard.microsofthealth.com. The dashboard is broken up into several sections which can be navigated to from the left sidebar.

The Home section provides a general summary of all your health data. The About Me section shows and allows you to modify your physical data, such as height and weight. The Bests showcases your highest fitness achievements thus far. The Steps section showcases how much distance you’ve covered in a given timespan.

Where things start to get really interesting is the Calories section, which shows you how much calories you’ve burned on a given day and lets you compare that to averages and analysis from the rest of Microsoft’s Health databases. If you have a Microsoft Band or Microsoft Band 2, which features the sensors that can detect your sleeping patterns, the Sleep section will be of great use to help you dissect and analyze the quality of your sleep.

The Activities section contains all the generic exercises of running, biking, golfing, general exercising, and guided workouts, and provides analysis and specific to each exercise session.

The aptly named Workout Planner section offers you two ways to put workouts onto your Band device: finding a pre-made workout from Microsoft and its partners, or building your own.

To really showcase the value of Microsoft’s initiatives to collect health data, the Comparisons section gives you a list of data showing how you compare to the average person in a physical class of your choice. Really cool feature.

Microsoft has also partnered with several other fitness companies to provide a more robust digital fitness tracking experience, which can be interfaced through the Connected Apps section.

Look forward to our more in-depth coverage of how the dashboard works.