Apple HealthKit

What is Apple HealthKit?

Apple HealthKit is a funky piece of kit that allows your app to access the treasure trove of health data stored on iPhones and Apple Watches. We're talking steps, heart rate, sleep, workouts, nutrition, medical info and even environmental data. Basically, if it’s happening in or around a human body, HealthKit probably has a solution for it.

For you, that means you can build apps that offer personalised health insights, track progress and genuinely help users live their best, most well rested, well hydrated lives. It’s a powerful tool for anyone working in health, fitness or wellness - public or private sector, gym or GP.

What can Apple HealthKit offer your business?

Put simply - access to rich, real world health data (with the users permission, of course - HealthKit is polite like that). In longer form:

Centralised health data

HealthKit collects and stores health related information from a variety of different sources including fitness apps, wearables and medical devices in the Apple HealthKit app then lets your app read and write to it. 

User consent & privacy

You only get the data users explicitly allow you to see. HealthKit manages permissions and privacy so you don’t have to become a part time lawyer.

Research & analysis

If you’re in healthcare, fitness or life sciences, you can analyse anonymised, aggregated data (opt-in only) to discover health and wellness trends and insights. It's a great tool for research and provides you with tangible areas of opportunity.

Multi device compatibility

Of course, HealthKit works like a dream with iOS devices but you can also sync it with a variety of third party health devices as well including Huawei watch, Polar watch and Xiomai watch thus, offering you a wider audience to tap into.

Who benefits from using Apple HealthKit?

In short, anyone who cares about health data. This covers a broad range of industries with some of the most relevant being:

Health care providers

If you're a health care provider (hospital, clinic, telehealth provider etc) you can use HealthKit to remotely monitor your patients data such as blood pressure, glucose levels and activity metrics all outside of the traditional bricks and mortar healthcare settings. This allows you to reduce in person visits saving time and money whilst also being beneficial to the client in reducing their travel requirements.

Companies with fitness & wellness apps

If you're in the fitness industry (personal trainers, wellness coaches etc) you can pull in steps, workouts, heart rate and sleep to deliver personalised plans to your clients and offer them meaningful progress tracking based on their actual activity.

Wearable device manufacturers

Perhaps you're on the manufacturing side, in which case, you can use HealthKit to sync your device data with Apple Health, giving users a complete, multi source view of their health instead of a single brand bubble.

Insurance companies

Maybe not the most obvious candidate, but if you're in insurance and provide health related insurance and/or incentives to your clients, tapping into Apple HealthKit can be an effective and inexpensive way to reward (or penalise) policy holders for specific behaviours.

Research companies

With consent (yes, there's that word again!) and ethics approval, you can analyse large scale anonymised data for studies on health trends, treatments and behaviour. Science, but scalable.

What are the best projects for Apple Healthkit?

Apple Healthkit is a specific and nuanced technology that does not have hundreds of use cases but for the projects it IS suited to, you'd be hard pushed to find a better alternative.

Personal health dashboards

HealthKit can aggregate a wide range of your user's health data from steps and heart rate to nutrition and sleep into a single source. You can then use this data to create personal health dashboards within your app, presenting information in clear, user friendly formats that help users track progress and improve their health and wellbeing whilst remaining engaged and loyal to your application.

Fitness & workout apps

You can read and write workout related data including distance, calories and heart rate using HealthKit, making it a perfect choice if you're looking to build a fitness app that can integrate with Apple’s native health ecosystem.

Chronic condition management

You can also use HealthKit to integrate live and historical biometric data. This is particularly useful if you have patients to monitor with long term health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma. This data can demonstrate how their conditions are progressing over time so the relevant support can be put in place and tweaked as needed.

Nutrition & diet logging

Nutritional data including calories, macros and water intake can be stored and retrieved through HealthKit. So, if you have an app that is focused around dieting, you can sync it with other health data including exercise and/or weight for more holistic insights.

Data visualisation & research tools

HealthKit can provide you access to a rich stream of user data that can be anonymised and analysed for trends. This makes it incredibly useful if you're running academic or R&D projects (again, with user consent and ethics approval).

How can we help?

Our experienced, UK based developers have worked extensively with Apple HealthKit and created intelligent, tracking applications for a number of companies including Bupa. If you're looking to enhance an existing application or create a new one using Apple HealthKit and the unique features it offers, come and have a chat with us today!