In June 2014, Ellie Powers, who is the product manager of Google Play, announced Google Fit which happens to be a brand new fitness platform. It meant for device developers and digital health apps. The main aim of Google Fit is to help individuals pursue their fitness goals in a much better way.
Google Fit was announced by Google only several weeks after the Health-Kit platform was announced by Apple. Apart from potentially integrating with activity trackers, Apple’s Health application also connected several medical devices such as medication adherence apps and glucometers. On the contrary, Google Fit focuses directly on fitness.
Just like Samsung’s SAMI platform, Google Fit provides its developers with just one set of APIs so that different devices and apps are able to talk to one another and thus the users can obtain more contexts around their different fitness metrics.
Google Fit has partnered with many companies which offer devices and health applications including Polar, LG, Motorola, Withings, Adidas, Basis, RunKeeper, Asus, Noom, and even Nike, which is definitely a bit surprising because of its long relationship with Apple.
According to Ellie Powers, the data which is shared by Google Fit is always under the control of the users. They can even erase the fitness data at any time they want. The developers can expect that the platform preview SDK will be available shortly. However, it was not mentioned by Powers whether Google Glass had any chance to interact with the platform.
Google happens to be working on different health projects since 2006. It launched a personal health record system known as Google Health in 2006. Google Health lasted approximately 5 years. However, the shutdown of the system was announced by Google in 2011 and its full functionality ended in January 2012. Another service called Google Flu Trends was launched by Google around the same time. But, it was recently found that a number of systemic problems are associated with Google Flu Trends. Perhaps due to all these reasons Google never used the word “health” even once during the unveiling of Google Fit.
