Google Fit, the Mountain View giant's answer to
Apple's Healthkit
platform, is now available as a preview SDK (software development kit) to help
developers build health and fitness apps for the health-tracking
platform. The search engine giant unveiled the Google Fit platform at
the
I/O event earlier this year.
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Announcing the news on Google's Developers blog, Google Fit's Product Manager, Angana Ghosh said, "At Google I/O we
announced Google Fit: an open platform for developers to more easily
build fitness apps. Today we're making a preview SDK available to
developers so that you can start to build."
Google has detailed that there are three sets of APIs designed to meet specific developer needs.
Sensors
API provides high-level access to sensors from the device and
wearables-so with one API your app can talk to sensors, whether on an
Android device or a wearable. So if you're making a running app, you
could register it to receive updates from a connected heart rate monitor
every 5 seconds during a user's run and give immediate feedback to the
runner on the display.
Recording API allows apps to register for
battery-efficient, cloud-synced background collection of fitness data.
For example, a running app could ask to store user's location so it can
map the run later. Once it registers for these data types, collection is
done by Fit in the background with no further work needed by the app.
History
API allows operations on the data like read, insert and delete. When
the exerciser finishes her run, the running app can query the History
API for all locations during the run and show a map.
The
new Google Fit framework will make use of the sensors on Android
smartphones and tablets, as well as connected accessories, to collect
health-related data which will be ready for apps to use. The Google Fit
platform can also monitor physical activity and food intake, as well as
health indicators such as heart rate and breathing. The Mountain View
giant had also announced partnerships with companies such as Nike,
Adidas, Runkeeper, HTC, Asus, LG and Motorola for the Google Fit
platform.
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"The
preview SDK gives you the tools to start building your app. You'll be
able to launch your app later this year when we launch the full Google
Fit SDK as part of Google Play services for handsets, Android Wear and
also for the web. We're excited to see what you can come up with to make
fitness in a connected world better," Ghosh added.
Further, the
official blog notes, "To get started, download the updated version of
Google Play services containing the Google Fit APIs for Android in the
Android L Developer Preview Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 system images. Use the
Android SDK Manager to download the Google Play services client labeled
'Google Play services for Fit Preview'.