HealthKit Stories November 25
Apple Watch can help you stay motivated to exercise and improve your health, and smart scales that sync data to the iPhone can be a fun and useful way to track your progress. If you want to easily collect your weight and other measurement data in the Health app on iPhone, the trick is to find a scale that works with HealthKit. Here are some of the current options on the market:
HealthKit Stories June 23, 2020
Health and fitness is a big focus for Apple and with iOS 14 and watchOS 7, HealthKit is seeing improvements for developers to do even more with health-related apps. Updates include a new ECG API that offers read access to third-parties, 13 new symptoms that can be tracked, as well as four new mobility data types.
HealthKit Stories November 12, 2019
FoodNoms for iOS offers robust food, calorie, macros tracking with an Apple-like UI
A new food, calorie, and macros tracking app for iPhone and iPad has arrived with a compelling design, great Apple integration, and more. FoodNoms is available now and customers can even try it out for free without signing up.
HealthKit Stories March 4, 2019
A new program called Connected Maternity Online Monitoring (MOM) at Ochsner Health System in New Orleans is seeing success with giving smart health monitoring devices to pregnant women. Notably, the O Bar which gets patients set up with devices free of charge was modeled after Apple’s Genius Bar and the program is set up to work with HealthKit.
HealthKit Stories September 28, 2018
It’s Apple Watch upgrade season for a lot of people which means deciding what to do with old models. Should you resell, gift, throw it in a drawer, or repurpose it?
Turning your old Apple Watch into a dedicated sleep tracker is a great way to get a little more mileage out of your original purchase. Take these steps to make sure the experience isn’t a nightmare.
HealthKit Stories February 19, 2018
Nokia’s ownership of Withings has been incredibly messy. After buying Withings in mid-2016, Nokia sued Apple over unrelated patents which resulted in Withings digital health products being pulled from the Apple Store.
While that dispute has since been resolved, Nokia now says it is reviewing its digital health business altogether. The result could be positive or negative for Withings customers depending on where ownership lands.
As a Withings customer myself, my hope is that Apple buys the digital health product business from Nokia — if only to do the bare minimum to maintain hardware that works with Apple HealthKit.
HealthKit Stories September 20, 2016
Apple has hired a Canadian doctor from a Toronto teaching hospital for an unspecified role. Dr Mike Evans runs what he calls a ‘mini med school’ YouTube channel known as DocMikeEvans, which aims to better educate the public about health matters.
“I’m very excited for Dr. Mike that he will be able to use his multiple talents to impact an even bigger worldwide audience,” said Dr. Arthur S. Slutsky, vice-president of research at St. Michael’s Hospital. “I’m looking forward to seeing his new innovations and having St. Mike’s collaborate with him in his new role.”
“Dr. Mike” isn’t allowed to say much about his new role, other than that he will be working on health-care innovation worldwide.
One reason Apple would be interested in him is no secret, however …
HealthKit Stories July 28, 2016
Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller joins DNA sequencing company Illumina’s board
Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller is joining Illumina’s board of directors, a company that provides technologies related to DNA sequencing for healthcare research among other services.
HealthKit Stories June 15, 2016
Each since it was released, Apple has made noticeable strides to improve the built-in Health app. It launched on iOS 8 where we saw Apple promote HealthKit enabled apps, then with iOS 9 we saw the expansion to new health data points. iOS 10 takes Health a step further by now allowing users to store their health records directly in the app using the Health Level 7 Continuity of Care Document (HL7 CCD) standard. No longer having to track paperwork or use CDs, these health records will be tracked directly in-app with the ability to be imported from Mail, Safari, and other applications.
HealthKit Stories March 31, 2016
Apple has started collecting some of the research data that users submit through apps using the company’s ResearchKit platform for the first time.
HealthKit Stories March 30, 2016
Boston Children’s Hospital wants your help with a ResearchKit project to measure body temps
While most people know that normal body temperature is 98.6F/37C, your actual temperature can vary quite a bit during the course of a day, and that can make diagnosing fevers trickier than it might seem. To help get more accurate baseline data, the Boston Children’s Hospital wants your help in logging temperature data across a day.
Fever is one of the most common signs of illness and causes anxiety to many. Doctors still struggle with determining the cause of a fever. In addition, “normal” and “febrile” temperatures vary between individuals.
Better understandings of how body temperature varies between individuals and identification of disease fever patterns (“feverprints”) could allow doctors to make faster, more accurate diagnoses.
The Feverprints app uses the ResearchKit framework to collect the data. The app of course has no way to measure your temperature, so you’ll need to do that manually, though there are inexpensive Bluetooth thermometers available to make the job a little easier.
Apple recently launched a new CareKit framework, which provides patients with health data they can share with their physicians and carers.
Via Gizmodo
HealthKit Stories February 11, 2016
For anyone looking to get better tracking and a bird’s eye view of your sleep habits, be sure to check out Sleep++ 2.0 available today. This latest version brings in a major sleep analysis algorithm overhaul to help users get a better understanding of nightly sleep patterns.
For users who frequently forget to stop their sleep tracking, the app’s update also introduces the ability to trim time off any extra hours accidentally accrued.
HealthKit Stories January 29, 2016
When news came out that Apple was working on a dedicated Health dashboard app, which would offer a way to take healthcare monitoring mobile, I was extremely excited. I had been recently diagnosed with traumatic arthritis in my knees and I needed a better all-in-one system to track my steps, weight, and BMI. None of the other apps on the market at the time seemed to do any one of those three especially well. Apple’s Health app has since become my go-to app for everything I wanted to log and more. It’s not perfect, but it’s a built-in dashboard with tie-ins to plenty of iOS apps.
Within a few weeks of using Health, I soon realized I wanted a better way to automate inputting data into the system. I eventually came to a methodology that worked great for me and decided it was time to share three of the different ways you can automate quickly logging your weight into the Health app.
HealthKit Stories January 7, 2016
In a radio interview on the syndicated show Conversations on Health Care, Apple COO Jeff Williams said that the reason Apple has come under attack for the use of child labor in its supply chain is that the company actively goes out looking for it. Other companies, he said, simply keep their heads down.
No company wants to talk about child labor. They don’t want to be associated with that. We shine a light on it. We go out and search for cases where an underage worker is found in a factory somewhere and then we take drastic actions with the supplier and the labor groups to try and make a change.
Then we report it publicly every year. We take a lot of heat for that. But we think the only way to make change is to go hit it head-on and talk about it.
Apple has come under fire over the years when underage workers were found in the company’s supply chain, and Williams has spoken before about Apple’s unusual stance on these issues …
HealthKit Stories December 14, 2015
iPhones have already been used for an impressive number of medical applications. We’ve seen them used to screen for skin cancer, manage diabetes, prevent blindness, provide eye examinations and diagnose everything from sleep apnea to bipolar episodes. But the next step could be a $250 organic chemistry lab we can carry in our pocket.
The WSJ has been talking to a couple of startups working in this field, including 6SensorLabs which has a device that can – with the help of a smartphone – detect whether a food really is gluten-free.
The Nima from 6SensorLabs is an organic-chemistry lab small enough to carry in your pocket. Right now it is only good for one thing: detecting gluten in foods at minuscule concentrations, as little as 20 parts per million, the FDA’s threshold for declaring a food “gluten-free.”
The company says that this could be just the start, with future versions able to detect the bacteria that cause food poisoning …
HealthKit Stories December 7, 2015
The iPhone is an amazing device. It fits in a pocket, yet it’s an incredibly powerful computer that connects us to the world, entertains us wherever we go, and captures quality photos and videos.
However, some of the iPhone’s tricks are hidden until you connect it to specific accessories. Did you know, for example, that you can save energy on your Christmas lights using your iPhone? Or improve the quality of your sleep with an iPhone-connected sensor? Or turn your car into a giant Siri-controlled entertainment and communications system? These accessories range in price from affordable to expensive, making them perfect gifts for iPhone users who want to unlock new capabilities. Read on to discover these hidden features, as well as the accessories you should grab or put on your wish list to unlock them… expand full story
HealthKit Stories October 6, 2015
Sleep tracking accessory maker Beddit is out with a new watchOS 2 app for Apple Watch today. Because Beddit offers a dedicated sensor for tracking your sleep duration and quality each night, Apple Watch is able to charge overnight as needed and still present sleep data in the morning. Thanks to hardware access granted to native software, Beddit’s watchOS 2 app lets Apple Watch double as a sleep tracker during the day for measuring naps and creating silent alarms. Just as Beddit’s watchOS 2 app is hitting the App Store, Beddit’s Smart Sleep Tracker is coming to Apple Stores around the world and apple.com for the first time starting today… expand full story
HealthKit Stories August 6, 2015
Apple’s ResearchKit system is going international for the first time since its launch earlier this year with Stanford University’s MyHeart Counts app being made available for UK and Hong Kong iPhone users. The MyHeart Counts app was among the initial iPhone-based research study apps that debuted this year. Stanford said just after the app’s release that ResearchKit did in 24 hours what would ordinarily take 50 medical centers a year to accomplish. expand full story
HealthKit Stories August 5, 2015
Adidas buys popular fitness app maker Runtastic for € 220 million
Runtastic, developers of several popular fitness iOS apps, today announced it has been acquired by Adidas for € 220 million. The move, according to a press release from both companies, will help Adidas bolster its efforts in offering connected products and its vision of “the convergence of sport, digital and data in an always connected and always on-demand world.” Or in other words, Adidas now has a strong software component with a large user base to integrate with its digitally enabled sports products including balls, wrist devices, apparel, and shoes.
Adidas already offers several of its own mobile apps that cross over into Runtastic’s territory, such as the miCoach train & run app and the Adidas Go app that integrates with Spotify to offer music matched to a user’s running pace. Runtastic, however, has around 20 mobile apps related to fitness and health and claims around 140 million downloads and 70 million registered users. The company also offers a few hardware products, including a scale and fitness tracking devices, that compliment its fitness apps that integrate with other third-party hardware including Apple Watch.
It’s unclear what Adidas has planned for the company and its apps, but Runtastic will be joining the Adidas teams and building new experiences as part of the brand going forward. What exactly that means for the Runtastic brand and integration with Adidas products remains to be seen.
HealthKit Stories July 16, 2015
First pitched by Steve Jobs in 2007 as “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator,” the iPhone has since evolved into a medical device of sorts as software has gotten smarter and sensors have become more advanced in recent years.
Apple embraced this with iOS 8 and the rollout of HealthKit, a framework which allows medical and health apps to share data with each other and your doctors with your permission. Apple’s open source ResearchKit took it a step further by allowing developers to turn apps into scientific health and medical research tests.
Scientific American recently profiled three smartphone apps in development that point to how the iPhone could become even better at monitoring our health. The apps in development aim to determine what a patient’s cough means, diagnose sleep apnea, and even predict a bipolar episode before it starts… expand full story
HealthKit Stories July 9, 2015
Purdue Pharma may use ResearchKit-collected drug data for profit
Apple’s ResearchKit platform has received a significant amount of praise since its launch earlier this year alongside iOS 8.2, and now researchers are looking into new ways to take advantage of the platform. BuzzFeed News today published an interesting report detailing how Purdue Pharma is investigating using ResearchKit to aid in its drug R&D efforts, in the first for-profit use of the platform.
“We know that all these changes in tech are going to impact health care, but we don’t know exactly how,” Larry Pickett Jr., Purdue’s vice president and chief information officer, said. “People have been talking about it for a long time, but haven’t been able to figure out how to leverage that data and take advantage of it. My team views ResearchKit as a very significant milestone in being able to move that capability ahead.”
The company has looked into the platform, but has not yet decided to build on app or decided what kind of data to collect. While some questioned Apple’s willingness to work with drug companies like Purdue Pharma, best known for OxyContin painkillers, Apple senior VP of operations Jeff William explained that Apple is willing to work “with anybody that is going to make an impact on people’s health.”
Purdue would be the first pharmaceutical company to develop a ResearchKit app, should it decide to enter the market. Other drug companies told BuzzFeed that they have no interest in the platform at this point, including Gilead Sciences and Pfizer.
Apple earlier this year partnered with IBM to share data collected with HealthKit and ResearchKit with companies like Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic.
HealthKit Stories May 14, 2015
With the HealthDash app, an alternative dashboard for Apple’s own Health app, Apple Watch users can view more health and fitness data points captured from Apple’s HealthKit platform, as well as a history of stats, right on their wrist. expand full story
HealthKit Stories April 27, 2015
LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is now integrating HealthKit data into patient records to provide doctors with a more comprehensive picture of the health of the patients they are treating, reports Bloomberg.
The hospital updated its online medical records system this weekend, turning on access to HealthKit for more than 80,000 patients, Darren Dworkin, chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai, said in an interview.
“This is just another set of data that we’re confident our physicians will take into account as they make clinical and medical judgments,” Dworkin said.
Tim Cook said back in February that he thought this type of use of HealthKit would be “profound” … expand full story
HealthKit Stories April 14, 2015
Apple announced today that its new ResearchKit platform is now available to medical researchers as an open source framework. Apple first unveiled ResearchKit on stage last month during the March event, promising that it would be available as an open source framework for developers and medical researchers this month. The framework enables the medical community to use the iPhone to distribute actual medical and health research through ResearchKit-enabled apps. expand full story
