Applications compatible with HealthKit have finally been rolled out to be downloaded from the Apple App Store.
HealthKit is easily the most prominent feature of iOS 8 at present, besides being the vehicle Apple has mounted to venture into the domain of health and fitness, which happens to be a multi-trillion-dollar industry.
HealthKit is Apple’s newfangled platform that links health-related apps within iOS thus allowing them to communicate with each other and share medical data, which is them compiled and made accessible to the respective users through the company’s new Health app that is pre-installed on the iPhone 6. In addition, it sends the data straight into hospital and doctor charts.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President had explained the entire concept behind HealthKit through his speech at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference back in June.
He said that despite the plethora of apps that do everything from “monitoring your activity level, to your heart rate, to your weight, and chronic medical conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes”, there is nothing to enable the users to “get a single comprehensive picture of your health situation.”
“But now you can, with HealthKit… (It) provides a single place that applications can contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health”, he continued.
The first HealthKit-integrated app to be launched was ‘FitPort’, which first monitors the users’ health-related data such as calorie intake, body fat percentage and so on, and then organizes all the information into an easy to read interface. The other HealthKit-compatible apps include WebMD, Yummly (for recipes and grocery shopping), MyFitnessPal and Carrot Fit.
Even as HealthKit created ripples in the media over the last few months, the launch of the apps was delayed last week on account of last-minute bugs and botches.
Following the iOS 8.0.1 fiasco, which involved users not being able to connect to networks, including WiFi, iOS 8.0.2 was launch on Thursday thus paving the path for the release of HealthKit, which is now up and running.
