Google Fit

What is Google Fit?

Google Fit is Google’s answer to a health tracking platform. Much like Fitbit and Apple Healthkit, it was originally designed to help individuals monitor and improve their physical activity, fitness and overall wellbeing. It works across Android devices, wearables (like Wear OS smartwatches) and other fitness apps with the main aim being to centralise health data in one place.

Despite being a 'consumer' product, the information gathered by Google Fit can also be made available to businesses with user permission. This provides a wealth of data that companies can utilise to help their own employees with their health and wellbeing, develop products for use by those in the healthcare industry and help with risk management for those in industries such as insurance.

What can Google Fit offer to your business?

Google Fit gives you a practical way to tap into health and activity data without having to build something from scratch. It’s flexible, well supported and designed to work alongside other modern digital products for maximum benefit.

Let's take a look at how it could be advantageous to your business:

Access to masses of real world health data 

Providing you have the correct permissions in place, you can access both day to day and longer term health data including steps taken, active minutes, calories burned and sleep duration. This data can then be used to build all sorts of features including progress tracking, personalised nudges and on-going weight management plans inside of your own apps and/or platforms.

Google Fit APIs & developer tools

Good news if you're in the development space. Google Fit offers a set of APIs that allow you to read and write fitness data, integrate with other health platforms and build experiences across Android, Wear OS and the web. This means you can build cross platform health and wellbeing apps, sync them with other fitness apps and devices and provide real time feedback to your users.

Better user engagement

When you integrate Google Fit into your product, user engagement tends to improve naturally. Fitness apps can update progress automatically, insurers can run reward (or consequential!) based wellness schemes and workplace platforms can help your employees turn their mundane, everyday movement into something a tad more exciting. 

Health innovation & research

For healthtech companies and researchers, Google Fit can support responsible innovation. Using anonymised and aggregated data, you can analyse individual and group data patterns, validate interventions and improve outcomes for patients.

Best projects for Google Fit

So, what kinds of projects actually work well with Google Fit? Here are some of the strongest, most practical options:

Fitness & wellness apps

As we touched on above, Google Fit gives you real time access to key health metrics such as steps, heart rate and active minutes. That makes it a great choice if you're looking to build a fitness app that you want to track progress, set goals and encourage healthy behaviour for your users. Your users also get the bonus of bringing their existing fitness history with them.

Corporate wellness

Again, we have mentioned this already but it is worth mentioning again! If, rather than developing a product to be sold, you're more interested in the well being of your employees, you can use Google Fit data as the foundation. With permission, it allows you to measure employee activity, reward healthy habits and personalise your corporate wellness program to ensure it benefits your employees as much as possible. It's wide device compatibility allows for easy onboarding without the need for special hardware and means many of your employees might already have a device they can use to take part.

Remote patient monitoring and support

There has been a significant rise in telehealth platforms in recent years due to their convenience and ability to save on time and resources. Google Fit can feed real time activity, heart rate and sleep data into remote healthcare platforms which allows you to monitor your patients behaviour and conditions between visits, flag immediate health risks and support lifestyle based treatment plans.

Insurance & reward based health programs

If you're in the life or health insurance space, Google Fit offers a way for you to incentivise your policyholders to stay active and healthy by offering discounts, points or perks based on Google Fit tracked metrics. It provides a reliable and secure way to verify activity data across a broad user base.

Health research & clinical studies

Finally, for those of you who are involved in research and academic studies, you can use anonymised, aggregated Google Fit data to study behaviour patterns, lifestyle trends or correlations between physical activity and health outcomes for a wide range of demographics.

How can we help?

Our team has the knowledge and experience to deliver powerful solutions that support your business goals. We've worked with a number of UK health companies on their own Google Fit projects and bring that insight and experience to every new client meaning you don’t need to have everything figured out from day one. Whether you’re planning a full featured app, exploring a new wellness initiative or just want to integrate a specific data stream, the right technical support makes all the difference and we're pleased we can offer that to you!