We have more data about our health at our fingertips than we’ve ever had before. Smartwatches and fitness trackers are the norm. We’re able to see in a glance our heart rate, how well we’ve slept, how many steps we’ve taken and calories burnt.

But are you fully capitalising on technology in keeping on top of your health? Here are 3 ways you can make the most of tech in taking care of yourself.

Monitor and Improve Your Activity Levels

For many of us, our jobs are simply not physical. Office work often means many hours of the day spent sitting. So making sure we get as active as possible requires a conscious effort.

With a fitness tracker or smartwatch, you can easily track the number of steps you take in a day and even floors climbed and heart rate during this activity.

Go one step further too with mobile apps that provide workout guides and push you to do more.

Whether you’re an iPhone owner or use an Android handset, there are apps to help you monitor and improve your activity:

• Apple’s own “Activity,” app for the iPhone
• Pedometer apps available on iOS and Android apps
• Sworkit for Android and iPhone
• Strong Workout Tracker for Android and iOS
• Pocket Yoga on Android and iOS
• Sports Tracker on Android and iOS

Monitor What You Eat

What we’re eating is critical to our health. We need to put great stuff in to get the best out of our body. Yes, sure – we can all carry a notepad around and write down every little thing we eat. But it’s simpler than that now. There are mobile apps where you can simply search for the thing you’ve eaten, select it and the app notes down the time of day, the nutrients, calories, carbs, fats, sugars etc that are in it too.

Over time, you can track the intake of key vitamins and minerals as well as the things we should be moderating like saturated fats and sugars.

It helps you to build a picture of the nutrition your body is really getting.

An essential app here is My Fitness Pal, which has an exercise tracker and a food tracker too. This app uses the hardware in your phone to scan the barcodes on the food products you’re eating to make noting it down easier than ever before.

Monitor Core Blood Markers

It’s all good and well knowing what’s going on with your weight and how you look, but is your active and healthy lifestyle having an effect on the inside? This has been the missing piece until now.

Innovative new companies like Forth with Life are enabling people like you and me to keep a full track on key biomarkers, giving us unrivalled insight into our health. You take a sample at home with a finger prick test and send it to a cutting edge lab. Just days later, you’ll receive access to a digital dashboard providing you with more in depth insight to your internal health than you’re ever likely to receive from your GP. You can subscribe to packages designed to enable you to track all of these biomarkers frequently too.

In other words, technology now enables you to understand, track and monitor your personal biomarker profile over time.

Tech and Your Health

As technology progresses at lightning speed, we can expect healthcare apps and devices to continue to develop, making it ever easier to proactively care for ourselves on the move.