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

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By Samantha Murphy Kelly2014-06-02 18:14:27 UTC

Apple announced its foray into the fitness tracking space on Monday with its new Health app 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 the app itself is called Health, the back-end gets the name HealthKit. 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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