Google To Launch Google Fit To Take On Rivals

The health industry is a multi billion dollar a year business.  From nutrition to exercise and everything in between, technology has had a long relationship with health and healthcare.  In recent years we have seen the arrival of fitness trackers and monitors to help us along life’s roadway to better physical shape.  But only a relatively short time ago we can see technology companies wanting to jump onboard as soon as they can.  We see lots of applications relating to fitness and sports firms have been great with their R&D into new and improved ways of fitness tracking.

Only a few weeks after Apple announced their take on the initiative, the Health app for iOS 8 and the corresponding HealthKit platform, it has come to light that Google will be making a similar announcement at their I/O conference. According to Forbes, Google’s new “Google Fit” service will be able to perform a similar function to what Apple’s HealthKit can.  It will be able to aggregate data from apps and fitness trackers on the user’s Android device.

Google Fit will collate this data through open APIs.  These are instruction sets, which allow apps to share information.  Apparently Google will also announce some partnerships with wearable device makers the conference.  It is still cloudy whether or not Google Fit will be integrated into Android by default or if it is going to be handled through an app.

Earlier in the year, Google announced the Android Wear project will bring Android to wearable technology, such as smart watches, with a focus being on furthering the relationship with health monitoring.  It is widely speculated that Google Fit may operate as a hub for the integrating data from the differing variety of Android Wear devices and other products on platform.

What are your thoughts?  Would a new platform to monitor our fitness help more?  Or is it another way for technology giants, such as Google to gain more personal information about us?  As always, if you would like to leave a sensible comment, then please do so in the comments section below.

[Image via numrush]

SOURCE: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/13/google-fit-health-tracking/