Google is in a love-hate relationship with fitness, and it's rumored to be trying to revive its past with the health industry using a cloud-based health data aggregator called Google Fit.
The report was first made by Forbes, which cites sources close to Google that the company is planning to launch its new platform at its I/O conference later this month. This pits Google against other technology companies that have recently announced similar platforms for aggregating and analyzing health and fitness information collected from various wearable devices and apps.
Just last week, Apple introduced its HealthKit software as a central hub for health-related information, which will be available with the release of Apple's iOS 8 later this fall. Earlier this year, Samsung also announced SAMI, short for Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions, which gathers biometric data from various devices and deposits them in the cloud for analysis.
Google forayed into the health industry in 2007 when it launched Google Health, which also served as a repository of users' health information, including hospital and medical records. Google Health unfortunately did not gather mass appeal due to privacy concerns raised by users who were not entirely comfortable telling Google highly personal details about themselves. The company closed down Google Health in 2012.
"Google Health never took off because consumers actually don't want to aggregate their data," says Derek Newell, chief executive at healthcare social network Jiff. "They haven't wanted to. What they want is information. They want meaning, rewards and a feedback loop."
If the rumored Google Fit is true, it is Google's way of saying it wants to try again, and the health-technology relationship might just be more successful the second time around. With the increasing popularity of wearable fitness devices that uses sensors to collect advanced health information about users, Google and other companies must see it as a sign that consumers are now ready to embrace new systems that aggregate health data and put them into the cloud. However, if Google Fit ends up being similar to HealthKit and SAMI, it raises the question of how Google plans to differentiate its offering from its competitors.
It is also unknown whether Google plans to integrate Google Fit into its Android mobile platform or if it will introduce the new software as a standalone app. One thing is clear, though. If the next installment of Android comes bundled with Google Fit, Samsung, which has been striving to make itself less independent on Google in the past several months, will find a way to tweak Android to replace Google Fit with its own SAMI platform.
