With its recent reveal of HealthKit and the iWatch, Apple is poised to give the more than 63 million iPhone users in the U.S. the ability to integrate their phone seamlessly with a variety of apps and devices to track calories, steps, sleep and other health stats, providing a full picture of health to a huge segment of the population — a move that health and technology experts say could help encourage people to eat better and lose weight.
HealthKit, labeled simply as Health on your phone’s screen, works as a hub for all your fitness apps. HealthKit won’t generate data itself, but instead gives users the ability to see all the data various apps and devices collect about their health in one space, which allows various fitness apps to work together for the first time. “Easy and secure access to personal health information is a goal we should be striving for,” says Ritu Agarwal, professor and Robert H. Smith Dean’s Chair of Information Systems at the University of Maryland. “HealthKit is the only repository that is able to consolidate personal health data from a variety of different apps to provide a holistic view of the individual and is a critical first step toward patient engagement in health and wellness.”
[Read: How to Turn Your Phone Into the Ultimate Weight-Loss Tool.]
HealthKit was made available in Apple’s iOS 8 update, though bugs, which Apple says will be fixed shortly, have precluded users from giving it a test drive. Nevertheless, the promise of the app has doctors excited. “HealthKit allows developers to focus on putting the information into something that is easy to digest and something consumers can use to change their behaviors,” says William Morris, associate chief medical information officer at Cleveland Clinic.
HealthKit is expected to be compatible with the iWatch, which is Apple’s first foray into the wearable tech field The iWatch will be available early next year, and not only does it allow you to receive notifications and ask Siri for directions to the nearest sushi restaurant right from your wrist, but it also comes with the ability to track your steps, calories, distance, heart rate and everything else a fitness tracker enables you to do. “The iWatch is one of the new breeds of technology that has the potential to truly revolutionize health care,” Agarwal says. “It’s likely to be beneficial for someone motivated to lose weight, and to the degree that you can share this information in real time with friends, it can potentially introduce a social and gaming component that could increase motivation and commitment to weight-loss goals.”
[Read: Making the Most of Your Fitbit.]
Since the iWatch is not yet available, it’s unclear how well its fitness capabilities stack up with other trackers, such as the FitBit or Jawbone. However, Agarwal says as long as it helps people be more aware of their physical activity, the iWatch will be an effective tool for helping people get in shape. “Information is the first step in a complex chain of behavior change,” she says. “Awareness is necessary to drive motivation. You cannot fix a problem if you don’t know that one exists.”
Besides the iWatch, companies like Dexcom, which makes continuous glucose monitors to help diabetics control their blood sugar, are working on ways to integrate HealthKit into their products. For example, patients could use Dexcom’s system with their phone and a FitBit to track their levels over time and gauge how medication, food, exercise and other factors work together to influence their blood sugar. “Data from Dexcom’s system could be hugely valuable, provided that there is guidance about what to do with the information,” says David Kerr, director of research and innovation at the William Sansum Diabetes Center in California. “The big low-hanging fruit on this one is helping people exercise more often and safely avoid big swings in their glucose levels afterwards.”
[Read: Living With Type 1 Diabetes — a Forgotten Disease.]
But as impressive as these technologies are, HealthKit and the iWatch can’t force users to make a change, Morris points out. “These are exciting, but they’re just tools,” he says. “Our job as doctors is to figure out how to encourage patients to take advantage of them.”
The best way to do that, Agarwal says, is to seamlessly incorporate the tools into patients’ lives by using them to solve their problems. “A rich repository of health information should reduce many other challenges associated with individuals’ management of their health,” she says, “such as remembering what prescription meds they are on or the last time a blood test was performed and what the results are.”
As developers figure out new ways to take advantage of these novel technologies, the sky’s the limit for what consumers will be able to do with them, Morris says, and it’s likely they will be used to solve problems we never knew we had. “The exciting thing isn’t the tool,” he says, “but what you can do with it.”
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How Apple is Bringing Health Care to Your Smartphone originally appeared on usnews.com
