Apple’s Announces its New HealthKit Suite

Software developers working in the health and fitness vertical will want to pay close attention to HealthKit, a new suite of tools unveiled by Apple at the company’s 2014 Worldwide Developer Conference. HealthKit is designed to allow programmers to create apps which integrate various types of health and fitness data into a single piece of software.

In the current app landscape, end users have to use separate apps to monitor various aspects of performance. For example, if you use Fitbit or RunKeeper, you have only a limited ability to access that data through other apps. The new suite bridges that gap by allowing individual health and fitness apps to report data to HealthKit, unifying all pertinent information into a single piece of software.

Health, the flagship HealthKit app, is highly customizable, allowing users to build a complete profile of overall health using metrics like blood pressure, glucose levels, sleep, diet and exercise. The app also provides sortable information, alerts, and allows users to keep a close eye on trends and habits that affect their health.

What’s more is that HealthKit is designed to allow users to share pertinent information with their healthcare providers. To that end, Apple has partnered up with the Mayo Clinic to develop highly specialized, integrated health and fitness apps for use through a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Apple also announced that it will support third-party fitness apps developed by Nike

As an iOS 8 app developer, the arrival of HealthKit could be a game-changer, allowing them to create software for easy integration into the suite. User experience will be vastly improved thanks to the single dashboard which collects key data from individual apps.

If you’re part of an iPhone app development company in San Francisco or elsewhere in the U.S., keep an eye open for future HealthKit announcements. Apple’s affiliations with Mayo Clinic and Nike may only be the beginning of a broad-ranging series of partnerships.