HealthKit

It is still primarily a technology company but Apple has lately been obsessing over one largely untapped market: medical technology and gadgets. It has turned the Apple Watch Series 4 into a miniature diagnostics lab, acquired and invested in medical and health startups, and is slowly but surely turning the iPhone into a digital repository for your medical records. The latter is practically what the company is discussing with the US Department of Veterans Affairs to help turn veterans’ medical records into digital form they can easily access on iPhones and iPads.

Continue Reading

During its peak, Pokemon GO has been credited for getting people off their butts and on their feet and walking around, sometimes even walking into things, unfortunately. But how much walking and activity did Pokemon GO really produce. Unfortunately, there’s really no way to get that past data and can only get it directly from tracking data from smartwatches or smartphones. To fix that, Niantic Labs is launching a new feature called Adventure Sync that records our steps, syncs with Apple and Android phones, and hatches eggs.

Continue Reading

Apple's push to make the iPhone the hub for your medical treatment continues, with iOS 11.3 adding Health Records for tracking tests, appointments, and more. A new addition to the iOS Health app, Health Records will pull in data from select healthcare services providers to be funneled straight into one place, rather than spread across multiple systems and devices.

Continue Reading

In the age of technology, health is fast becoming a priority. Devices like the Apple Watch lean into it as a means to encourage sales, and both Google and Apple have apps designed to quantify your well-being. They work, too; not only do you get a glimpse of your raw data points, you often get insight on how that looks over the course of weeks and months, and what trends your data is returning. The question I had was wether or not connected weight lifting equipment like the Bowflex SelectTech 560 can help me achieve goals.

Continue Reading

Apple has had its HealthKit service for a while now and back during WWDC 2014 Apple talked about how it would involve major health providers in the use of HealthKit. So far, the service has not been particularly embraced by the healthcare providers around the world and has mostly been used for collecting data from devices like wearables and pucks placed in shoes. That may be about to change as Apple is building improved health record software better able to analyze and understand patient data.

Continue Reading

A pair of trademarked healthcare-related images have appeared in the USPTO registered by Google this week. Both of these images suggest that the long-abandoned Google Health may make a resurgence, coming back now thanks (at least in part) due to Apple's efforts with HealthKit and CareKit. Now that Apple has all but convinced the tech-savvy of the positivity of monitoring their own health with their mobile devices, Google can join in (or return to, rather), this smarter, healthier future.

Continue Reading

IBM has announced a new app for iPhone and Apple Watch that aims to gather data on the relationship between sleep habits and overall health. Dubbed SleepHealth, the app does far more than reveal when users are waking up in the night like typical sleep trackers. The app is built on IBM's Watson Health Cloud, a platform that was developed in partnership with Apple and Johnson & Johnson, and connects with ResearchKit, the open-source framework from Apple.

Continue Reading

Misfit is revamping its fitness tracker, with an online dashboard and added smart home integration, while Apple HealthKit support gets a boost. My Misfit is a new browser-based hub for reviewing health data from the Misfit Shine and Flash wearables along with the Beddit sleep-tracker; it'll have a count of steps, calories, and distance travelled, along with overviews of weekly and monthly trends.

Continue Reading

Apple is taking reproductive health seriously in iOS 9, with a new set of comprehensive HealthKit measures that could be essential for those trying to conceive or those trying not to. With software tracking things like menstrual cycles and intended to predict fertility some of the most popular in the App Store, it’s perhaps no surprise that Apple Health should expand to embrace it. Rather than just a few basic metrics, however, HealthKit is aiming for a real insight.

Continue Reading

iPhones can track a myriad of data from your everyday life. From your footsteps to your heart rate, we relay a lot of data without ever having to opt-in. Apple is looking to gather a new type of information from its users--DNA. Apple is planning to release apps, using its new ResearchKit developer tools, to help hospitals and research teams conduct clinical trials and other medical research from their iPhones, and genetic testing is just another piece of that puzzle.

Continue Reading

With Apple Watch's release on the horizon, functionality details are pouring in. We'll break down how Apple Watch's heart rate sensor actually works, and go into some ways to ensure that you always get a valid heart rate reading from the device, straight from the latest Apple support document. Constantly tracking heart rate is the key to correctly tracking how many calories are burned throughout the day. The watch will not only continuously monitor your heart rate, but will offer a "Heart Rate Glance" feature where you can go back and look how your heart rate measured up at any point that day.

Continue Reading

There's a lot to be said about how the new Apple Watch does much more than just tell the time; it has several full-fledged health and activity tracking features, not to mention being able to run its own apps. One of these forthcoming apps tells an alternate form of the time, such as how much longer you have to live. It's called Life Clock, and it's much more than a joke or novelty that just counts down seconds arbitrarily, it actually estimates and updates the time based on your health data.

Continue Reading