An Apple App a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

With the launch of iOS8, users will be able to utilize the Apple Health App. Health is an aggregation app, meaning it pulls information from your other health apps, and displays it all for you in a single dashboard. Apple’s Health can offer users a new experience while allowing them to keep the apps they’ve become accustomed to using.

You can allow your current apps to “write” data to your Health app, so that your data — like how many steps you take, and how many calories you’ve eaten — will show up on the Health app dashboard. You can also allow these apps to “read” data from the Apple app, so your different health apps can share information with one another. There is currently a limited selection of apps that work with Apple Health, but the hope is that more popular apps update their software to work with Health in the near future.

Esentially, the Health app is a hub for info to come and go from one central location. You choose what you want shared. For example, you can allow the data from your blood pressure app to be automatically shared with your doctor. Or allow your nutrition app to tell your fitness apps how many calories you consume each day. The hope is that this type of tracker aggregator could help users find connections in their data that they might not notice otherwise, like whether their workout quality changes based on temperature or humidity levels, or your intake of a single nutrient.

One cool feature is the emergency card that is accessible from your Lock screen, something EMS workers will undoubtedly learn to look for in the near future.