What you need to know
- Health Connect is a new initiative from Google and Samsung announced during I / O 2022.
- The goal is to make it easy to share health and fitness indicators across devices.
- Google has already confirmed that it works with developers and services of some popular fitness apps.
One of the biggest complaints about using the best fitness trackers and smartwatches is that you can’t always sync your data between different services. Arguably the worst criminal of this is the inability to seamlessly sync workouts and other health data between the Fitbit app and Google Fit. However, a new platform will be announced during Google I / O 2022 and may help change it in the near future.
According to Google, Health Connect is not only a new platform, but also an API targeted by app developers. This allows developers to “securely access and share health and fitness data between Android devices.” Google developed this in collaboration with Samsung. This is not surprising given how closely the two companies work together on the Wear OS platform.
In the accompanying blog post, Google has confirmed that it already works with MyFitnessPal, Leap Fitness, Withings and more. But what’s exciting about us is the adoption of Health Connect by Samsung Fit, Fitbit, and Google Health. These APIs are accessible to developers via the Android Jetpack.
The integration of the Health Connect platform will allow many of the most common and important health metrics to be shared between devices. These indicators include vital signs such as activity, sleep, nutrition, body measurements, heart rate and blood pressure.
- activity: This captures all activity that the user does. This includes health and fitness activities such as running, swimming, meditation and sleep.
- Body measurement: It captures general data related to the body. This includes getting the user’s weight or the user’s basal metabolic rate, among other data types.
- Cycle tracking: It captures the menstrual cycle and related data points such as binary results for ovulation tests.
- nutrition: It captures hydration and nutrition data types. The former represents the amount of water the user has drank with a drink. The latter includes many optional fields, from calories to record the nutrients consumed by the user to sugar and magnesium.
- sleep: It captures interval data related to the user’s sleep length and type.
- Vital: This will give you important information about your general health. It includes everything from blood sugar to body temperature to blood oxygen saturation.
Perhaps more importantly, Google also prevents health applications from accessing data without your permission. In addition, Google shares that “users have full control over their privacy settings and have more control over which apps are always requesting access to their data.” This is due to the security and privacy improvements seen in recent Android releases, including Android 13 Beta 2.
The only downside to today’s announcement is that it’s not yet for users. You’ll have to wait for the platform to integrate with different applications, but hopefully HealthConnect will debut by the time PixelWatch is available. But more importantly, we want to be able to sync data to Google Fit from other health and fitness tracking applications.
