Forbes has “multiple sources with knowledge of the company’s plans” who say that Google will soon a health data aggregation service called Google Fit. Supposedly slated to launch later this month at the Google I/O conference, Google Fit is apparently a set of APIs that will link equipment like fitness trackers through the Google cloud.
If it’s as described, Google Fit would challenge Apple’s HealthKit and Samsung’s Sami platforms. With the forthcoming Android Wear operating system for wristwear, a set of health-related APIs to serve data to the devices would make sense. In the same way, HealthKit is aimed at aggregating fitness and health data for the iOS world; Samsung is moving along the track of putting its wearables on the Tizen operating system. Three sets of operating systems, three APIs. Makes sense.
At the recent Glazed conference, before Salesforce announced Salesforce Wear, we asked Salesforce SVP Daniel Dubow if there maybe weren’t getting to be too many APIs in the wearable world. He said he thought not; programmers, he said, should have a choice of connecting what they wanted, and they could always ignore the ones they didn’t think they need.