For the health geeks, one of the subtle announcements of the big Apple keynote last month was HealthKit. HealthKit allows apps that provide health and fitness services to share their data with the new Health app and with each other. In a rare false start for Apple, HealthKit didn’t make the iOS 8 release, but was in the first update one a week later. Welcome to the complexities of healthcare, Apple, I hope you make it better for us all.
As a long-time user (such as is possible) of health and fitness apps and wearables, I decided to check out HealthKit and its integration with a few top apps. I started with two popular and well-respected apps: MyFitnessPal (which in spite of its name is primarily a calorie counter) and Jawbone Up, the well known activity and sleep monitor.
These apps already connect with each other. If you log a workout in Jawbone Up, it gives you a calorie count in MyFtinessPal. So, what does HealthKit add to the mix?
Jawbone Up was a puzzle at first. Right about the time HealthKit came out, Jawbone announced a new app compatible with HealthKit The concept was interesting. The Purple Jawbone app uses the iPhone for step tracking – no band required! It then transmits those steps to Apple’s new ‘Health’ app. The Health app is essentially a dashboard for what’s going on in HealthKit.
I looked at every possible setting in vain on the original Blue Jawbone app for HealthKit connectivity. Nothing there! There was no HealthKit data exchange.Was Jawbone forcing loyal band owners into installing 2 apps to get to HealthKit? I reached out to Jawbone and got no response. So, I ended up with a very odd setup where data was being transmitted from the original Blue Jawbone app to the Purple Jawbone app and then to HealthKit. Interestingly, the data for steps walked collected independently by the band and by the iPhone was almost identical, indicating that at least if you keep it in a pants pocket, the iPhone makes a pretty good pedometer. So, I guess you don’t need a Jawbone Up as a pedometer now, but you will need it to capture sleep data. I will give a shout-out here to Jawbone for their beautiful iPhone app. It’s very well designed, fun to use, and offers interesting insight. Without a doubt this data flow was weird, but it did work.
So what about the much anticipated Apple Health app and HealthKit? It was a bit of a meh. The display pretty much looks like an oscilloscope. I had succeeded in working in MyFitnessPal and Blue Jawbone -> Purple Jawbone as sources. The Health app now shows calories and steps. The displays are scientific and clean, but that’s about it. It’s essentially a database, there are no insights provided. The Jawbone app provides much more insight into activity and provides recommendations. MyFitnessPal provides better nutrition tracking and can already integrate the Jawbone activity.
Right now HealthKit and the Health app are nothing more than a foundation for other more important apps and capabilities that are yet to come. It’s like looking at the basement of a new house under construction. Yes, the basement is there and looks solid, but someone needs to build an interesting house on top to make it worthwhile.
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