Google and Samsung quietly revealed Well being Join final week, a brand new platform designed to share completely different sorts of well being knowledge throughout quite a lot of apps.
We covered it last week, however don’t be stunned in case you haven’t heard about it – it wasn’t revealed through the Google IO presentation, however reasonably on the Android Builders’ weblog.
The Android Builders’ video under dives slightly deeper into what Well being Join is and does. It collects 50 several types of knowledge throughout six classes; exercise comparable to steps taken or energy burned, sleep, vitamin data, cycle monitoring, physique measurements comparable to weight and BMI, and important statistics like coronary heart price.
Well being Join will then take all this knowledge and share it between its accomplice apps, comparable to menstrual monitoring app Flo, vitamin diary app MyFitnessPal, good well being gadget maker Withings, and exercise plan apps created by Leap. Google Match, Fitbit and Samsung Well being apps are additionally included on this expanded ecosystem, so your Pixel Watch, Fitbit Sense, or Samsung Galaxy Watch can feed data into Well being Join too.
“We’re thrilled that Samsung and Google are working collectively to meet this want with a brand new answer, Well being Join,” Samsung government VP TaeJong Yang wrote in a press release final week. “Builders now have entry to a single set of APIs that allow the creation of health and well being experiences. With the brand new Well being Join API, customers may have a complete set of controls to handle their well being and health knowledge throughout apps.”
The tip result’s set to be a extra full, holistic image of your well being, with all the information held in a single place reasonably than unfold over half-a-dozen apps. Permitting Google into this shared ecosystem would possibly even imply, within the close to future, your well being knowledge is ready to be accessed through Google Residence’s voice instructions.
The concept isn’t essentially new, as Garmin Join affords the identical expertise to a restricted extent. Nonetheless, Google’s ubiquity and its means to get accomplice apps onside (learn: a lot of cash) would possibly imply Well being Join is the start of the Alphabet health empire.
Google and Samsung are clearly eager for Android builders to leap on board and experiment with the knowledge Well being Join can present, because the extra apps that use Well being Join, the higher the service shall be. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t introduced throughout Google IO: why do an enormous, splashy launch in case you have a service relying on companions, and also you don’t have many companions but? For Google and Samsung, it’s higher to launch later within the 12 months and promote the possibly a whole lot of apps in a position to interface with Well being Join, than letting the cat out of the bag too early and getting a mediocre response.
It additionally explains why Google is in no actual rush to incorporate Wear OS into the latest Fitbits, as an alternative prioritizing the Pixel Watch. It doesn’t want its personal working system to work on Fitbit gadgets proper now, as any knowledge collected by Fitbit will be fed again into the central Well being Join platform, to be shared and distributed how Google sees match.
A imaginative and prescient of the long run
You get up feeling Nicely Rested, to borrow a phrase from Skyrim. Your Fitbit smartwatch has already recorded your sleep knowledge, which is now hosted on Well being Join in addition to your Fitbit app. You eat breakfast, logging it in MyFitnessPal as common, which calculates the energy you’ve simply eaten and sends the information to Well being Join.
On the best way house, you head to the fitness center, opening a exercise plan in your Leap app. Deciding on the exercise in Leap, your chosen routine is cross-referenced with the energy you burned through the exercise. That is calculated individually by your smartwatch, however each units of knowledge get despatched to Well being Join.
Whenever you get house, you soar within the bathe, pausing to step in your Withings smart scales. The scales calculate your weight and physique fats share, sending the information to – you guessed it – Well being Join.
Lastly, exhausted in your pajamas, you ask Google Residence for a breakdown of your well being exercise immediately. Google Residence fishes Well being Join for all of your knowledge throughout 5 completely different apps, and tells you whether or not you’re in a calorie deficit or calorie surplus for the day.
Is that this the long run that awaits us? If Google and Samsung have their manner, it might nicely be. A single well being platform for Android customers will take time for builders to undertake, nevertheless it could possibly be a real game-changer. Nonetheless, earlier than it makes its solution to the customers, we must always wait and see if it’s adopted by builders first.
