Google looks to announce a new service at the Google I/O conference that will track activity data. Will it succeed where Google Health failed?
Google reportedly is preparing to re-enter the personal health market with the release of a health data aggregation service called Google Fit.
According to Forbes, Google will launch the service at the Google I/O developer conference, which runs June 25 and 26.
Back in 2008, Google introduced Google Health, a health data aggregation service for storing standards-based medical records on behalf of patients. But healthcare providers and patients saw little value in putting Google in the middle of their relationship. Google shut the service down in 2011, noting that it didn’t scale as hoped.
Perhaps this time will be different because the health data in question comes not from healthcare providers but from wearable devices. Google Fit aims to be a storehouse for data from wearable activity tracking devices such as Fitbits, Jawbone UPs, and Nike FuelBands, and smartphone apps that gather or generate related data. Those three activity trackers, incidentally, accounted for 97% of the revenue in a digital fitness device market estimated to have reached $330 million last year, according to NPD.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
For technology companies, much of the enthusiasm behind the emerging market for wearable devices, and for the related non-wearable networked appliances that constitute the Internet of Things, comes from the prospect of a bountiful data harvest. Companies making these devices, or providing software for them, see revenue potential in helping customers store and manage the data exhaust spewed by their hardware. In some cases, they see this information as something that can be exploited for marketing purposes: “As someone with high blood pressure, perhaps you’d like to buy…”
Date: June, 14, 2014