what you need to know
- Health Connect is a new initiative from Google and Samsung announced during I/O 2022.
- The goal is to make it easier for health and fitness metrics to be shared between devices.
- Google has confirmed that it is already working with several popular fitness app developers and services.
One of the biggest complaints when it comes to using the best fitness trackers and smartwatches is that you can’t always sync your data between different services. Arguably the most egregious offender of this is the inability to seamlessly sync your workouts and other health data between the Fitbit app and Google Fit. However, a new platform was announced during Google I/O 2022 that could help change that in the very near future.
According to Google, health connection it’s not just a new platform, it’s also an API for app developers. This allows developers to “securely access and share health and fitness data on Android devices.” Google developed this in collaboration with Samsung, which is hardly surprising given how closely the two companies have been working together on the Wear OS platform.
in the accompaniment blog post, Google has confirmed that it is already working with MyFitnessPal, Leap Fitness and Withings. But the part we’re excited about is the adoption of Health Connect by Samsung Fit, Fitbit, and Google Health. These APIs are now available for developers to access through Android Jetpack.
Once the Health Connect platform is integrated, many of the most common and important health metrics can be shared across devices. These metrics include activity, sleep, nutrition, body measurements, and vital signs like heart rate and blood pressure.
- Exercise: This captures any activity a user does. It can include health and fitness activities like running or swimming, meditation, and sleep.
- Body Measurement: This captures common data related to the body. It includes capturing a user’s weight or a user’s basal metabolic rate, among other types of data.
- Cycle tracking: This captures menstrual cycles and related data points, such as the binary result of an ovulation test.
- Nutrition: This captures the hydration and nutrition data types. The first represents how much water a user drank in a single drink. The latter includes many optional fields, from calories to sugar to magnesium that record what nutrients the user consumed.
- To sleep: This captures interval data related to a user’s sleep duration and type.
- Vital parts: This captures essential information about the user’s general health. It includes everything from blood glucose to body temperature to blood oxygen saturation.
Perhaps most importantly, Google also makes sure that health apps can’t access data without user permission. In addition, Google shares that “users will have full control over their privacy settings, with granular controls to see which applications request access to data at any given time.” This goes along with the enhanced security and privacy improvements we’ve been seeing in recent Android releases, including Android 13 Beta 2.
The only drawback of today’s announcement is that it is not user-oriented yet. We’ll have to wait for the platform to integrate with the different apps, but hopefully Health Connect will make its debut by the time the pixel clock is it availabe. But more importantly, we hope it will only make it possible to sync data to Google Fit from other health and fitness tracking apps.
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