Posted by Sara Hamilton, Developer Relations Engineer
Well being and health information is interconnected – sleep, diet, exercises and extra all inform each other. For instance, contemplate that your sleep impacts your restoration, which impacts your readiness to run your favourite 5k. Over time, your restoration and exercise habits drive metrics like coronary heart charge variability, resting coronary heart charge, VO2Max and extra! Typically this information exists in silos, making it exhausting for customers to get a holistic view of their well being information.
We need to make it easy for folks to make use of their favourite apps and gadgets to trace their well being by bringing this information collectively. They need to have full management of what information they share, and once they share it. And, we need to be sure builders can allow this with much less complexity and fewer traces of code.
Because of this we’ve continued to enhance our Android Well being choices, and why right now at I/O 2023, we’re asserting key updates throughout each Well being Join and Well being Companies for app builders and customers.
What’s Android Well being?
Android Well being brings collectively two necessary platforms for builders to ship sturdy well being and health app to customers; Well being Join and Well being Companies.
Well being Join is an on-device information retailer that gives APIs for storing and sharing well being and health information between Android apps. Earlier than Well being Join, there was not a constant approach for builders to share information throughout Android apps. They needed to combine with many alternative APIs, every with a distinct set of information varieties and totally different permissions administration frameworks.
Now, with Well being Join, there may be much less fragmentation. Well being Join offers a constant set of 40+ information varieties and a single permissions administration framework for customers to regulate information permissions. Which means builders can share information with much less effort, enabling folks to entry their well being information of their favourite apps, and have extra management over information permissions.
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Well being Companies is our API floor for accessing sensor information on Put on OS gadgets in a power-efficient approach. Earlier than Well being Companies, builders needed to work straight with low-level sensors, which required totally different configurations on totally different gadgets, and was not battery-efficient.
With Well being Companies, there may be now a constant API floor throughout all Put on OS 3+ gadgets, permitting builders to put in writing code as soon as and run it throughout all gadgets. And, the Well being Companies structure signifies that builders get nice energy financial savings within the course of, permitting folks to trace longer exercises.
Well being Join is coming to Android 14 with new options
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Well being Join is at the moment accessible for obtain as an app on the Play Retailer. We’re excited to announce that beginning with the discharge of Android 14 later this 12 months, Well being Join shall be a core a part of Android and accessible on all Android cell gadgets. Customers will be capable of entry Well being Join straight from Settings on their system, serving to to regulate how their well being information is shared throughout apps.
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A number of new options shall be shipped with the Well being Join Android 14 launch. We’re including a brand new train routes function to permit customers to share maps of their exercises by way of Well being Join. We’ve additionally made enhancements to make it simpler for folks to log their menstrual cycles. And, Well being Join updates shall be delivered by way of Google Play System Updates, which can enable new options to be up to date typically.
Well being Companies now helps extra makes use of circumstances with new API capabilities
We’ve launched a number of thrilling adjustments to Well being Companies this 12 months to help extra use circumstances. Our new Batching Modes function permits builders to regulate the information supply frequency of coronary heart charge information to help house health club use circumstances. We’ve additionally added new API capabilities, like golf shot detection.
The brand new model of Put on OS arrives later this 12 months. Put on OS 4 would be the most performant but, delivering improved battery life for the following technology of Put on OS watches. We shall be releasing extra Well being Companies updates with this transformation, together with improved background physique sensor permissions.
Our developer ecosystem is rising
There are over 50 apps already built-in with Well being Join and a whole lot of apps with well being companies, together with Peloton, Withings, Oura, and extra. These apps are utilizing Well being Join to include new information, to present folks an interconnected well being expertise, with out constructing out many new API integrations. Be taught extra about how these well being and health apps are creating new experiences for customers in areas like sleep, train, diet, and extra in our I/O technical session.
We even have over 100 apps built-in with Well being Companies. Apps utilizing Well being Companies are seeing greater engagement from customers with Put on apps, and are giving their customers longer battery life within the course of. For instance, Strava discovered that customers with their Put on app did 25% extra actions than these with out.
Get began with Well being Join
We hope many extra builders will be part of us in bringing distinctive experiences inside Android Well being to your customers this 12 months.
In case you’d wish to create a extra interconnected well being expertise on your customers, we encourage you to combine with Well being Join. And in case you are a Put on developer, be sure you are utilizing Well being Companies to get the very best battery efficiency and future proofing for all upcoming Put on OS gadgets.
Try our Well being Companies documentation, Well being Join documentation, and code samples to get began!
To be taught extra, watch the I/O session:
