If rumours are anything to go by, then Apple will unveil its much anticipated wearable – the iWatch on September 9, this fall. According to market analysts, iWatch holds the potential to pull in $9 billion revenue for Apple. The wearable is a result of strategic positioning by Apple in line with its iPhone.
How exactly and by how much, iWatch will make a difference to its users, only time will tell? As of now, Apple seems to gear up towards expanding into the healthcare industry with apps and wearables such as the iWatch.
New Developer Kits
In its June World Wide Developers Conference, Apple launched its HomeKIt and HealthKit. The purpose of these new developer tools is to create outstanding apps and wearable technology.
Now, that it is eminent that Apple is marching towards the health sector, it has come up with a new set of guidelines for developers. Rightly, called the Healthkit Framework.
Healthkit will filter the data gathered by any third party health and fitness apps. This data then gets transferred and funnelled into the Apple’s Health App. Here, the app categorises the bulk data into easy to consume formats.
The report states that this ‘data’ falls under sensitive category and must be kept away from any company such as advertising or data re-sellers. Developers have been asked to use the HealthKit APIs with extreme caution. The data must strictly be used to offer better services, into health and fitness and not for anything else.
It is nothing new to see Apple going out of the way to create unique and user-friendly products. This time is no different. Since a year or so, Apple has been in talks with technology and health experts to better its understanding of blood analysis and pulse rate measurement.
The new iWatch will be made using both, the HomeKit and HealthKit. No Doubt, Apple fans have something great coming their way.
The HealthKit
HealthKit is a framework. It is used for collecting data on health apps, in the XCode language of Apple. This data can be stored, retrieved and modified. The data basically consists of personal medical records and statistics of users, in a synced form.
HealthKit gathers data such as birth dates, gender, blood pressure, calories, their work-outs, temperature in arm pits among others. Developers can get access to user’s data either with apps built with HealthKit or from third party services which have the HealthKit functionality.
What’s interesting to note is that HealthKit lets developers build live apps. The data is collected by HealthKIt in a read-only format. It is then sent to developers who can easily analyze it. HealthKit reports any changes to this data to developers. The statistical data allows programmers to perform a variety of functions, such as to add, take average from maximum and minimum of heart and pulse rate and so on.
The idea is to use the data captured by HealthKit to create new health apps and improve on existing ones. Apple is striving to offer smart and intuitive health apps which can offer interesting insights into the users medical records and help them improve it.
What this Means?
The new developer kit makes sense, as the iWatch will benefit a lot from it. In this scenario, it is responsible on the part of Apple to ensure the data stays secure and is not misused.
Isn’t this the reason we love Apple?
With its iWatch, Apple will offer something better than its counterparts. Given the length of time being invested by Apple to perfect it.
The Paradigm Shift
Like Apple, its competitors are also busy exploring the healthcare space. However, the amount of interest that Apple is generating is notable. Not that I am an Apple loyal, one can’t deny that Apple has created unique, user-centric solutions, which solely makes it worthy of being admired.
Want to add something to this update? Share it here.
