Reviewing a client's biometrics

Wellness, not diagnosis. Everything on this screen is coaching information. Protocol shows the reading and that person’s own recent history, and nothing else: it does not score a biometric against a clinical threshold, does not call a value normal, abnormal or critical, and is not a diagnostic tool. If a number concerns you or your client, the next step is their doctor, not the dashboard.

Basic  Connecting happens on the client’s phone; reviewing happens here. Whatever a client syncs, from Apple Health, Health Connect or WHOOP, lands on one screen on the dashboard.

Where to find it

Open a client, go to the Tracking tab, and pick Biometrics from the rail on the left. It sits in the Body group, with Overview and Check-ins. The small figure beside the row is days since the most recent reading, because the useful question about a stream that syncs continuously is how fresh it is.

The window

Four buttons above the tiles choose how far back you are looking: 30 d, 90 d, 6 mo and All. The screen opens on 30 days, and everything on it follows that choice, the tiles and the trend and the table alike. Beside the heading you get the count of readings the window holds.

The tile strip

Up to six tiles across the top, and which six depends on the client. Protocol starts from the metrics most worth a headline, Resting HR, HRV, Sleep, Steps and Recovery, keeps only the ones this client actually has readings for, then fills the remaining slots from whatever else they do have: active energy, body fat, weight, VO2 max, blood pressure, a readiness or strain score.

That means two clients rarely show the same strip, which is deliberate. A client whose phone sends only steps and active energy gets tiles for steps and active energy, instead of a row of empty boxes for a watch they do not own. A client who has synced nothing at all still gets the five headline tiles, reading as dashes, so you can see at a glance that there is nothing coming in yet.

Each tile carries the metric name, the change across the window, the latest value in that window, and a short bar history behind it. The tiles here are read-only: unlike the Tracking overview’s tiles, they do not open a bigger chart.

Why sleep is in minutes

Values appear in the unit Protocol stores the metric in, and sleep is stored in minutes, so a good night reads as 421 rather than 7. Steps carry no unit at all, because “2,987 count” reads as a typo where “2,987” reads as a step count. Nothing here is converted to your unit system the way a weight is: these are the numbers the device sent.

The change beside a tile is direction, not a verdict

A rise and a fall are tinted differently, and that is the whole meaning of the tint. It is the same two colours for every metric on the screen, whichever direction happens to be the one you were hoping for on that particular number.

There is no green, amber and red ladder on this screen, no in-range or out-of-range badge, and no optimal-range band. That is a deliberate limit rather than a missing feature. Protocol is a wellness and optimization platform: it shows the reading and the shape of that person’s own history, and it does not decide what a resting heart rate or a night’s sleep means. Deciding that is a conversation for your client and their doctor. The trend is there to make that conversation better informed.

Sleep and resting heart rate

One card, labelled Sleep & recovery, charts two lines over the window you picked: sleep duration and resting heart rate. Each is scaled to its own history rather than to a shared axis, because hours of sleep and a heart rate share no scale and forcing one would flatten whichever has the smaller spread. What the card is for is the shape of each line against that person’s own past, which is why there are dates along the bottom and no values up the side.

With nothing to draw the card says so: “No sleep or heart-rate readings in this window.”

The readings behind it

Underneath, every reading in the window in one table, newest first, whatever metric it belongs to: the date, the metric, the value with its unit, and the source. Long windows are capped at the most recent hundred rows, so narrow the window if you are hunting for something older.

With nothing in the window you get “No readings in this window. Biometrics arrive from the client’s connected apps and devices.” That is your cue to ask the client to connect from their own app. You cannot connect on their behalf from the dashboard: point them at the guide for their phone (Apple Health / Health Connect) or WHOOP.

What the Source column actually says

The Source column shows the stored source name, not a tidied-up label. Expect to read:

Nothing is wrong when you see healthkit rather than “Apple Health”. It is the raw name of the source, shown as stored, and it is worth recognising the six of them.

Which reading wins when two sources overlap? You get one reading per metric per day, chosen by a fixed ranking: lab, then WHOOP, then phone (Apple Health / Health Connect), then manual or imported. A WHOOP recovery beats a phone estimate; a lab draw beats everything. Nothing is thrown away, the higher-ranked reading is simply the one you see.

A read-only window, by design

This screen reviews; it does not manage.

• You cannot connect, disconnect or force a sync from here. Those live on the client’s phone, which keeps their health permissions where they belong, with them.
• You cannot import numbers from here. There is no import button anywhere on Biometrics. Numbers that reach Protocol another way still appear here, on the same tiles and in the same table, tagged with the source they came in under.
• There are no verdicts here. No colour ladder and no range badge, and no wording that calls a value normal or abnormal. See Reading lab results for the same principle applied to bloodwork.

For the full statement of what Protocol is and is not built to do, see Intended Use.

Back to: Integrations overview · or set a client up with Apple Health, Health Connect or WHOOP.