For a couple of months now we’ve been hearing about Apple’s plans to release a new fitness-tracking system called Healthbook. This morning, 9to5Mac reports a lot of details about the rumoured health-monitoring app for iOS. The app is impressively exhaustive. How is all of this possible? We’re loathe to say an iWatch might be coming… but maybe?
From the screenshots reported by 9to5Mac, Healthbook takes its core design from the existing Passbook app for ticketing. Instead of a repository for everything from boarding passes to concert tickets, this time, the file box will store a variety of health metrics that tell you about everything from fitness to nutrition to sleep to new metrics we’ve never seen before like hydration.
For each of the above categories, Healthbook is capable of charting a lot of metrics, which altogether paint an impressively comprehensive picture of your health. Like existing fitness tracking software, the app will help you monitor your weight weight, activity and nutrition. Like some of the newer products we’ve seen released over the last year, Healthbook will also help you keep an eye on your heart rate and blood pressure. Healthbook also wouldn’t be the first piece of software to help you monitor your sleep.
Curiously, the app tracks metrics we haven’t seen done in a practical or mass market way yet on mobile devices. Tracking bloodwork, oxygen saturation and blood sugar would be a revolution for people who need to monitor those metrics on a daily basis. Hydration, as we mentioned before, is also totally new in this sphere. It’s a metric a lot of us aren’t keeping an eye on, buy we’d probably be happier if we did.
The final question is will Healthbook be integrated directly with a Cupertino-produced piece of fitness tracking hardware. We’ve been hearing about the “iWatch” for years. Sure, much of what Healthbook tracks could be data from the iPhone’s on-board sensors, the M7 Motion Co-Processor introduced last year, as well as information gathered from third-party wearable devices. But there are enough new metrics that nobody is tracking that maybe the iWatch is closer than we think? Hard to say for sure.
9to5Mac says we can expect Healthbook to land with iOS 8 in the second quarter of 2014. [9to5Mac]