Apple Gets Into Fitness Tracking With Health App and HealthKit for iOS 8 - Webmaster News

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Apple announced its foray into the fitness tracking space on Monday with a new Health app and a service called HealthKit coming to iOS 8.

During a keynote presentation at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, the company introduced new features coming to the next-generation software for the iPhone and iPad.

While developers use HealthKit, consumers will see the Health app. The concept is similar to Apple’s Passbook app, the iPhone’s virtual pocket for things like airline boarding passes, movie tickets and coupons. It will be able to pull in data from other third-party apps such as Nike to keep all your health-related information in one hub.

Apple’s Craig Federighi, senior VP of software at Apple, said that apps can now track “everything from monitoring your activity level, to your weight, to chronic medical conditions like blood pressure and diabetes.”

“But right now that information lives in silos,” he added.

Apple also named the Mayo Clinic as a partner, allowing users to log information like blood pressure within the app. HealthKit would then alert the MayoClinic app about whether or not the results are in the normal range and even contact medical professionals.

The fitness monitoring app will likely go head-to-head with wristband trackers like the Fitbit and Jawbone, but having access to vital health data would be relatively new to smartphones.

The company recently patented the technology for smartphones to keep track of this type of cardiac data.

Although the iPhone 5S doesn’t have the ability to monitor these vitals, it does have fitness-tracking abilities.

The move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. Apple has hired various health and fitness experts in the past year to work on hardware and software development.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/02/apple-health-healthkit-app/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss

Samsung Shows Off Simband, a Futuristic Health Tracker - Webmaster News

New Post has been published on http://www.outils-webmaster.eu/samsung-shows-off-simband-a-futuristic-health-tracker/

Samsung’s

Hoping to take the lead in the race to build the ultimate wearable device, Samsung offered a sneak peak Wednesday at its next-generation health-tracking wristband, known as the Simband.

Using different wavelengths of light beamed at your skin, Simband will track multiple measures of its wearer’s health continuously, such as blood pressure, respiration, heart rate, hydration level, and the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood.

The one Simband demonstrated on stage at Samsung’s “Voice of the Body” event in San Francisco showed a continuous stream of heartbeat information, seismograph-style, such as one might see on a hospital-grade ECG machine. A “shuttle battery” will allow you to wear the device 24 hours a day, charging it on your wrist while you sleep.

The still-speculative Simband is designed around a new open software platform called SAMI, for Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interactions. The company described it as one health platform to rule them all, bringing in information from non-Samsung health trackers too. Samsung says it will release SAMI APIs for developers by the end of the year.

“We believe that once we’re working from a common platform, sensors will become more accurate, and will be brought to market more quickly,” said Ram Fish, president of digital health for Samsung Electronics. He added that SAMI will exist as a “compliment” to Samsung’s already existing S Health platform.

Young Sohn, president and CSO of Samsung electronics, announces the open-source SAMI platform.

No price or release date was offered for what was described as an “investigational device.” Given that Apple is said to be announcing a health-tracking platform called HealthBook next week, the timing of Samsung’s announcement suggests the company is staking its claim to the next-generation wearable space first.

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/05/28/samsung-simband/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss