Google to re-enter health market with Google Fit

13 Jun 2014

Google is now planning to re-enter the wearable tech health market not with a new device, but rather a service that will collate a user’s various data from devices to form a detailed picture of his or her state of health.

The new service, to simply be called Google Fit, is expected to be showcased at the company’s upcoming developer conference Google I/O at the end of this month, according to Forbes.

The obvious comparison on the market is its biggest rival, Apple, and their own health monitoring service, HealthKit,  that they announced at their own conference earlier this month to be launched with its new operating system, iOS.

Google Fit is expected to work by allowing data from various devices and apps to be aggregated on the service as well as announcing partnerships with a number of different wearable tech makers.

The source close to Forbes within Google discussed the service being linked with the company’s cloud services and would then become part of the Google Fit ecosystem.

The question remains what Google’s long-terms goals are for the service given that their previous attempt to enter the health market with Google Health proved such a disaster that the company was forced to close its operation in 2012.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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