Google brings all-in-one Health Connect feature to Android phones

Google's Health Connect feature offers comprehensive health, and fitness summary covering --sleep tracking to vital signs--40 plus data types across six categories.

With more than three billion active user base, Android is the largest mobile ecosystem. To cater to all, the Play Store houses millions of apps in several categories such as news, cab hailing, food, government services and health monitoring too. The latter in particular is now more prominent than ever before. Given how the world went into a pause mode for two years due to the Covid-19 outbreak, people were couped at home doing both household chores and professional work, and there was very little scope for exercising. Now, people are focusing on improving their fitness.

There are hundreds of third-party apps which offer basic features such as calorie burn count, water reminder, idle alerts to custom training with an on-demand personal coach. With too many apps on the phone, it is a little difficult to monitor overall health. Also, the storage gets reduced and you won't be able to add any more photos to the album.

Now, Google has come up with a solution-- Health Connect -, which integrates all fitness and well-ness apps under one roof for easy access and offers comprehensive health, and fitness summary covering --sleep tracking to vital signs--40 plus data types across six categories. Also, users will be able to manage permissions to apps in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time.

Several app companies such as Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers, and Lifesum. others have agreed to Google's Health Connect.

With Google Health Connect, users can view comprehensive data at one place. Credit: Google

"In the past, developers had to establish multiple API connections to share data between different apps and each integration was costly to build and maintain. This limited developers’ data-sharing capabilities and made it hard for users to unlock this data so that it could be utilized in different apps. Now, with Health Connect, building integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration," said Sara Hamilton, Developer Relations.

As of now, the Health Connect integration feature is available to a handful of apps and is expected to expand to other health-and-fitness-related apps around the world in the coming weeks.

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