HealthKit Sleep and Self-Care Types

Seven identifiers cover sleep, mindfulness, self care events and alcohol. Four are category types and three are quantity types, and the most consequential member of the group, sleepAnalysis, is one of the category types. Everything awkward about reading sleep out of HealthKit follows from that one fact.

sleepAnalysis has been there since iOS 8.0 and carries HKCategoryValueSleepAnalysis. A record is one state, expressed as an enum case, covering one interval. A night is therefore not a record. It is a run of adjacent records, and the number your user thinks of as "hours slept" is something you compute by measuring and combining intervals, not something you read out of a value field. Anyone porting a sleep feature from a provider that returns a nightly summary object hits this on day one. What are sleep stages covers what the states describe, and the sleep tracking API reference covers the shape you get on each platform.

sleepAnalysis is also the only identifier in this group with a verified counterpart in the cross-platform matrix: Health Connect's SleepSessionRecord, which carries stages of its own. The other six are Apple only until a counterpart is verified, so a cross-platform self care feature will be thinner on Android than the iOS version unless you build the missing half yourself.

mindfulSession, from iOS 10.0, is the clearest case of a category type whose value carries nothing. It holds a generic HKCategoryValue and Apple gives it 6 words of discussion. The meaningful content of a mindful session record is its duration, which is to say its start and end. Write the interval, read the interval, and do not look for an intensity that is not there.

The two self care events work the same way. toothbrushingEvent arrived in iOS 13.0 and handwashingEvent in iOS 14.0, both with a generic HKCategoryValue. Handwashing is the better documented of the pair at 60 words of discussion against 7 for toothbrushing. Both are occurrences with a duration, which makes them countable per day and streakable, and makes averaging them meaningless.

The quantity types are where the numbers live, and two of the three are about alcohol and behave in opposite ways. numberOfAlcoholicBeverages, added in iOS 15.0, is cumulative and sits in the count unit family, so drinks add up over an evening exactly as you would expect. bloodAlcoholContent, one of the two identifiers here that date to iOS 8.0, is discrete and sits in the percent family, so it is a reading at a moment and summing it produces a number with no meaning at all. Two neighbouring types, one topic, opposite arithmetic. That is the trap the sum or average split exists to head off.

The third quantity type is appleSleepingBreathingDisturbances, dated iOS 18.0, and it is a hole in the documentation rather than a type you can build on. The parse found no abstract, no discussion at all, no aggregation style and no unit family for it. That is not a gap in this page; it is a gap in the source, and the silent identifiers explains what to do when you hit one.

Across versions the group is spread thin: two identifiers at iOS 8.0, one each at 10.0, 13.0, 14.0, 15.0 and 18.0. Sleep is also the group most likely to straddle midnight, which makes the day boundary problem a practical concern rather than a theoretical one when you decide which calendar day a night belongs to.

All identifier names, abstracts, availability versions and aggregation styles here were taken from a parse of Apple's developer documentation performed on 2026-08-28.