Apple announced at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday that it's making a run into the health and fitness space. The tech giant unveiled HealthKit, a Passbook-like application that's using iOS 8 to create a comprehensive picture of users' health by pulling in data from third-party apps.
The news means iPhone users will be able to keep better track of their personal health and fitness data, but from one centrally-located place. As Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, noted, apps already exist for "everything from monitoring your activity level, to your weight, to chronic medical conditions like blood pressure and diabetes." Although helpful, "that information lives in silos."
Apple is looking to break down those barriers with HealthKit, which was being buzzed about far before the annual conference under the name "Healthbook." With HealthKit, users will be able to input information about their nutrition, all while the updated operating system tracks their calories burnt, blood pressure and sleep patterns.
The Mayo Clinic has already stood up in support of HealthKit, as the renowned research medical group has partnered with Apple. Federighi provided an example of why, explaining that when a patient records a blood pressure reading with his or her iPhone, HealthKit would notify the Mayo Clinic and the app would be able to decipher whether a patient's reading was within the normal parameters. If not, health care professionals would be automatically alerted.
Other healthcare providers will soon be able to receive and transmit data from patients' checkups. Due to the sensitivity of those records, however, Apple said it "has deep privacy protections in place." Stanford Hospital and Clinics, UCLA Health and Sutter Health have all signed on to contribute to HealthKit in the future, as well.
As previously noted, this feature will have a drastic effect on Boston's tech community. Activity tracking startup RunKeeper and weight loss app Lose It! will both be paying close attention to the update. Because HealthKit is integrating third party apps, nothing could change. Or, users could start solely using the newly-unveiled feature instead, tracking their diet and steps walked from the single dashboard.
In April, RunKeeper announced their new step-counting app Breeze, designed to take down wearables like FitBit. Breeze runs almost invisibly on users' phones, gathering data on their physical activity throughout the day, as well as motivating them to stay on a healthy track. In months, Breeze garnered 75,000 users from 25 countries. Will that momentum keep growing with Apple's announcement, or slow the team down?
Lose It! has a similarly impressive following, helping its users lose a collective 32 million pounds. With Lose It!, individuals can track their daily caloric intake — and easily, with the help of a built-in barcode scanner that adds foods to a user's daily log. But, given HealthKit will also track nutrition, what could this mean for the Boston-based company?
The third-party aspect is what's keeping Apple's news promising. That is, if the apps can become early partners.
Image via Flickr User tecnomovida (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
