After a recent question was posted on Discord wanted to identify the various Data_types within iOS Health, I wanted to help out, but found that I couldn't find the definition of lots of the data_types in use.

This led me to do some digging to see what I could find and results in what I think is the most comprehensive list available.

I'll pause here to say that this article IS NOT going to go into detail about how the various databases interact with each other and how the quantities and samples and units etc all work. If you want that as an article, I can for sure do it, but this is intended as a quick reference to the specific datatypes.

There are some items missing; I believe these are either deprecated and/or for applications and peripherals that I don't have. So if you recognize any that I am missing, please let me know!

When I started this research, I had already created some test data on my device and had managed to match them to several of the known codes. Simple ones like Steps and Distance etc. But there was still a lot missing. Through a couple of hours of playing around, I settled on the following process which made things much easier.

The important database is \private\var\mobile\Library\Health\Client\HealthApp.sqlite. Note; this doesn't contain any health data of the user. This is just the database that contains the information used by the app such as the data types and news articles etc.

Within this database are 3 tables of note;

The ZCODERAW field here is the data_type from the Samples table of the HealthDB_Secure database.	This table acts as a joiner basically. The Z_1DATATYPES correlates with the Z_PK from the ZDATATYPE table. The Z_4FEEDITEMS correlates to the Z_PK of the ZFEEDITEM table.	This table contains everything that may show up on the feed. From the Articles, Hightlights, Data items etc. As mentioned, the Z_PK of this table relates to the ZFEEDITEMS of the Z_1FEEDITEMS table.

It's setup like this because each datatype can have multiple entries in the FEEDITEM table. To demonstrate this, lets take a look at DataType 63.

We see here in the ZDATATYPE table that ZCODERAW value 63 has a Z_PK of 7.

We see here that datatype 7 has 5 feed items

Finally, we can see that all these items are related to Sleep. The one we need is the last one, where the ZCONTENTKINDRAW is "data" (Note that it only says "data" if there is some records under that type. If not, it says "noData".

I then wrote a little SQL to help me get to the data I needed quicker...

SELECT ZDATATYPE.ZCODERAW, ZLOCALIZEDTITLE FROM ZDATATYPE JOIN Z_1FEEDITEMS ON ZDATATYPE.Z_PK = Z_1FEEDITEMS.Z_1DATATYPES JOIN ZFEEDITEM ON Z_1FEEDITEMS. Z_4FEEDITEMS = ZFEEDITEM.Z_PK WHERE ZCONTENTKINDRAWVALUE LIKE '%data'

Now thats out of the way. Here is the data you've come for...

Red Lines are items that I can find no record of on my devices. Orange Lines are items I have records of, but cannot determine their origin. I believe they are Apple Watch related and research is ongoing.

I can't post this article without also documenting the Activity Codes which are used when the user creates a Workout or Activity event.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this quick article will help you in the future. I think while a lot of these data types are never going to be evidential (if they are even present!) but at least if you know what they are, you know if you can safely ignore them.

Thanks for reading!