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What is Apple's Healthkit?

7/3/2014

3 Comments

 
What is Apple's Healthkit?

WWDC 2014 keynote has their vision.  This is really great.  

The idea is to put together all of the user's health information into once place.  Kind of a digital medical record stored on the cloud and comprehensive combining all data regarding health and fitness.

It immediately made me wonder... Isn't Android going to make a similar product?

Apparently so.  Google Fit is the answer to Apple's new application.

One thing that is interesting that I found during my research is that this is not the first time that someone has tried to combine this data before.  Apparently Google tried before to create something called Google Health.  

According to this article from techtimes.com  linked here, the CEO of Jiff which is a dedicated health device platform has said that: 

"Google Health never took off because consumers actually don't want to aggregate their data," says Derek Newell, CEO of digital health care platform Jiff. "They haven't wanted to. What they want is information. They want meaning, rewards and a feedback loop."

This is an odd statement because when data is aggregated or gathered  it creates it's own data.  The method and means of data collection is it's own data, and when data is combined to form things like graph showing trends relationships and correlations can be identified.  When he says that they want meaning I'm guessing that what he is really trying to say is that consumers don't want information without context, but something that  is interpreted and that they can understand... which makes sense.

Apple is steadily losing market share to Android.  Well at least according to this article by BusinessInsider.com.  However just as Apple made a play to get their computers into the educational space, Apple may also be making a play to enter the medical space.

However there is also a disturbing correlation as both education and health care in this country both have the unfortunate distinction of having poor returns vs. other countries when looked at from a cost/benefit analysis.  Here is another article from Business Insider about the educational ranking of the United States, and here is an article from healthaffairs.org about the inefficiencies of medical care for services vs cost  in the United States.  

Hopefully digitization of medical records will go a long way towards reducing the waste talked about in the article.




3 Comments
ed lee
7/4/2014 04:22:03 am

https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/samplecode/Fit/Listings/Fit_AAPLProfileViewController_m.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40014583-Fit_AAPLProfileViewController_m-DontLinkElementID_14

website for code.

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ed lee
7/4/2014 04:23:57 am

https://developer.apple.com/healthkit/

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ashish
7/6/2014 04:28:04 pm

great work. perhaps you can draw a table comparing and contrasting google vs apple healthkit and we can post it in our social media to see how people like it. Jason. can post it from SInai.

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    Ed Lee is an aspiring medical student and a man driven by his passion to care for and advocate for others. 

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