This month, we introduced the next era to help you live a longer, healthier life: the Google Health app, Google Health Coach and the Fitbit Air. Our goal is simple: we want to give you control over your health data, and the tools to use it, your way.
Right now, keeping track of your health means jumping between different devices, apps, patient portals or even hand-written notes. It shouldn’t be this hard. That’s why we designed the Google Health App to help you bring your data into one secure place so you can see your whole health and wellness, not just parts of it, and make sense of your information.
Connecting your data across devices
With the Google Health app, you can connect all sorts of data as inputs — from your wearables to your smart scales, medical records and more.
For example, you could wear a smartwatch during the day to stay connected and track a workout. That same day, you could pull in food logs from MyFitnessPal, upload your medical records from a recent doctors’ visit, weigh yourself on a smart scale or wear a Fitbit Air to bed to track your sleep. Now, it’s all connected in a centralized place. The Google Health app makes sense of all this data, addressing overlaps and filling the gaps, identifying trends and connecting dots so you don’t have to. And the Google Health Coach takes that information and provides personalized, proactive recommendations to help you meet your goals.
Google Health connects with any app or device that integrates with Health Connect or Apple Health as well as hundreds of apps through the Google Health APIs (formerly Fitbit APIs). If you’re in the U.S., you can even sync your medical records and get insight into key information like labs and vitals. Over the coming months, we’ll offer support for more data types and deeper integrations, plus expand medical records to more countries and much more.
Putting users first
People have strong preferences for their main wearable device, or use multiple devices for tracking different data types that matter to them. But right now, some apps connect easily, and some don’t. Some providers make it difficult for you to access and control your own records. This is a solvable problem if we all work together and on behalf of everyone.
We will lead by example with our open Google Health ecosystem. Data portability must be a core tenet for the entire industry. That’s why we’ve built a new experience from the ground up, and opened our platform to third parties. We want everyone who works in this space to build great apps on top of Google Health, and we are committed to building on top of platforms like Health Connect and Apple Health.
With the Google Health app, you can share your data how and where you want. For example, you can:
- Share your data with other apps using Health Connect or the Google Health APIs
- Export a TCX file for you workouts and share it with your fitness app or coach
- Share your steps and Cardio Load data with friends for motivation
- Use Google Takeout to access and export all your data
And, we’ll be expanding these sharing capabilities soon, so you can:
- Share your data with Apple Health
- Share your medical records with your provider or family members using Smart Health Links
- Explore and build on your own data with tools like command line interfaces (CLIs) and other AI skills
Health and wellness should be personal, and how you share and use your data should be just as personalized. How you use the Google Health app, how much and what kind of data you share is completely up to you. You can share your data, opt-in to features, export it or delete it at any time. And, your Google Health data is not used for Google Ads.
We encourage other companies like device makers, app developers and healthcare providers to work together to make products more integrated and easier to use.
