WEARABLES - INSIDABLES - IOT - CONNECTED DEVICES - QUANTIFIEDSELF

Although Fitbit's smart watch asset acquisitions activity has captured a lot of interest, CEO James Park made clear on a conference call with analysts that its group health and digital health business partnerships will be the biggest growth drivers for the future of the business.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a bio-degradable, edible battery powered by melanin.

While wearables primarily are buckled to consumers' wrists at this point, they'll soon find a new home: the ear, says Craig Stires, associate vice president for big data, software and analytics at IDC Asia Pacific. And they might even get a new moniker: hearables.

At Apple’s WWDC event, the company announced its rumored native health tracking platform, which we now know to be called HealthKit. Rumors have circulated that the tracking platform would be called HealthBook, though we noted previously that was probably not the official name.

“Developers have created a vast array of healthcare devices and accompanying applications, everything from monitoring your activity level, to your heart rate, to your weight, and chronic medical conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes.” Apple senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said at the event. “But up until now the information gathered by those applications lives in silos. You can’t get a single comprehensive picture of your health situation. But now you can, with HealthKit. HealthKit provides a single place that applications can contribute to a composite profile of your activity and health.”

The platform HealthKit comes with a user-facing app simply called “Health”. 

“With Health, you can monitor all of the metrics you’re most interested and your activity, but not just that,” said Federighi. “You can use third-party applications. Now we carefully protect your privacy, so you have total control over which applications have access to your health information. But you can of course provide different activity, weight, heart rate information to the Nike app. And Nike’s working to integrate HealthKit, so they use that information to help you in your personalized fitness goals.” [...]

“We’re also working with the Mayo Clinic, innovators in healthcare,” he said. “And with their integration with HealthKit, they’re going to be able to — when a patient takes a blood pressure reading, HealthKit automatically notifies their app. And their app is automatically able to check whether that reading is in that patients’ personalized healthcare parameters threshold. And if not, it can contact the hospital proactively, notify a doctor, and that doctor can reach back to that patient, providing more timely care.”

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“Learn how the connectivity between devices is continually impacting our everyday lives and how the healthcare industry is no exception to these disruptions.”