This month, we introduced the next era of helping you live a longer, healthier life: the Google Health app, Google Health Coach, and 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 handwritten notes. It shouldn’t be that hard. That’s why we designed the Google Health app to help you bring your data into one secure place, so you can see all of your 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 kinds of data as input – from your wearables to your smart scales, medical records and more.
For example, you can wear a smartwatch during the day to stay connected and track a workout. In the same day, you could download food logs from MyFitnessPal, upload your medical records from a recent doctor’s visit, weigh yourself on a smart scale, or wear a Fitbit Air to bed to track your sleep. Now it’s all connected in one centralized place. The Google Health app makes sense of all that data, addressing overlaps and filling in the gaps, identifying trends and connecting the dots so you don’t have to. And Google Health Coach takes that information and makes personalized, proactive recommendations to help you reach 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 Google Health APIs (formerly Fitbit APIs). If you’re in the US, you can even sync your medical records and gain 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 more.
Putting users first
People have strong preferences for their main portable device or use multiple devices to track different types of data that are important to them. But right now some apps connect easily and others don’t. Some providers make it difficult for you to access and control your own records. This is a problem that can be solved if we all work together and on behalf of everyone.
We want to lead by example with our open Google Health ecosystem. Data portability must be a core principle for the entire industry. That’s why we’ve built a new experience from the ground up and opened up our platform to third parties. We want everyone working in this space to build great apps on top of Google Health, and we’re 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. You can, for example:
- Share your data with other apps using Health Connect or Google Health APIs
- Export a TCX file to your workouts and share it with your fitness app or trainer
- Share your steps and Cardio Load data with friends for motivation
- Use Google Takeout to access and export all your data
And we’re expanding these sharing options 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 the way you share and use your data should be just as personal. How you use the Google Health app, how much and what kind of data you share is entirely up to you. You can share your data, sign up for features, export it or delete it at any time. And your Google Health data is not used for Google Ads.
We encourage other companies such as device manufacturers, app developers and healthcare providers to work together to make products more integrated and easier to use.