Health and HealthKit: Apple unveils its fitness tracking, mobile health app

At the WWDC 2014 developer conference on Monday, Apple’s senior vice president Craig Federighi unveiled the tech giant’s highly-anticipated mobile health offerings: the Health app and the HealthKit toolkit.

Federighi explained that Apple doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel – it knows there are some awesome health and fitness tracking apps and devices out there – but instead it wants to bring everything together into one place to make it as easy to access your information as possible:

“Developers have created a lot of apps for monitoring your health. But up to now the information gathered by those applications lives in silos. But now you can with HealthKit. A single place where applications can gather the data. And there’s an app – Health.”

Health is an activity tracking application that’s able to monitor the calories you’ve burned up, the steps you’ve taken and the quality of sleep you’ve had all from a handy dashboard that looks similar to the one you’d find with the Jawbone Up. It works with third-party apps and gadgets, so you can choose to sync data from elsewhere and don’t have to change up your current routine.

Health will be powered by HealthKit and Federighi explained that Apple has been working with a number of organisations in both the US and the UK to devise new ways to make the app as easy-to-use and beneficial as possible. One of the main plans is for doctors to be able to gain instant access to their patients’ daily metrics so they can monitor for problems and call them in to be seen if necessary.

Developers will have access to a set of tools to build bespoke health and wellbeing apps themselves, allows them to focus on a wide range of metrics, from reducing stress or testing blood.