New Apple Health Technology Prepares to Do Battle With Samsung

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At its WWDC 2014 developer’s conference, Apple (AAPL) had plenty of announcements, but one new initiative that’s generating real buzz is HealthKit, the new Apple health functionality being baked into iOS 8.

However, arch-rival Samsung (SSNLF) was also in San Francisco the week before, where it unveiled its own health technology ambitions with its cloud-based SAMI health platform, Simband hardware and $50 million for “accelerating digital health innovation.”

Apple Health technology

Source: Apple

Just six months ago, health technology with smartphones was largely a question of whether to choose a Fitbit sensor or a Nike (NKE) Fuel Band. Most of us were just holding our breath for Apple’s long-anticipated iWatch. Would it pack sensors that could put those fitness trackers out of business?

The iWatch was a no-show at WWDC 2014, but AAPL actually unveiled something far more ambitious (at least in terms of health technology): Apple health products will be integrated into iOS 8, able to communicate with and store data from third-party sensors and apps and able to share that data with your doctor.

In iOS 8, this takes the form of an Apple Health app that’s being positioned as a hub to store all of a user’s medical and fitness data, providing a health overview. In addition, HealthKit is a framework that allows health and fitness apps and sensors to share data with each other, including the ability for that personal medical info — which will be in Apple’s cloud — to be shared with a doctor or other medical professional.

We can see many similarities in competitor’s approach to healthcare technology, and Samsung and Apple appear to be on a collision course.

In particular, both are making a play for cloud-based storage of health and fitness data — a feature that may prove to be key if they hope to push health technology beyond consumer adoption and into medical use. By storing that data online (instead of keeping it locked into a specific device) the data itself suddenly becomes a much more valuable commodity.

According to a report published by EY, the market for medical technology in the U.S. alone was worth $339.6 billion in 2012. While it’s currently dominated by companies like General Electric (GE), healthcare technology like SAMI and HealthKit could capture some of that revenue by taking advantage of a new point of entry — the patient or consumer — and providing the platform that makes their data available to medical professionals.

But that’s not the only thing happening here…

At the same time, by offering the option of that connectivity, Apple and Samsung are able to market their smartphones as having a real advantage over competitors like Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows phones, which lack a health data platform. At the very least least, it makes AAPL and SSNLF more attractive the health-conscious, a demographic that’s expected to grow as baby boomers continue to adopt mobile devices even as they run into age-related health issues.

Want to see how serious Apple takes this demographic?

Just consider the Lockscreen option that’s part of the iOS 8 Apple Health app. It displays medical conditions, medications, allergies, blood type and emergency medical contact info on a user’s iPhone’s Lockscreen.

And in Samsung’s press release for SAMI, the company specifically pointed out the 1.2 billion people expected to be over age 60 by 2025, as well as their implication for health technology.

The big difference at this point is that Samsung has a head start, thanks to its more hands-on approach to heath technology. There’s the Gear Fit wristband fitness tracker, the heart rate sensor built into the Galaxy S5 smartphone, its S Health app which tracks readings from Samsung’s own sensor-equipped gear and the new Simband.

Apple may yet go that route as well by taking advantage of the fitness tracking capability of the M7 motion coprocessor in the iPhone 5 and the forthcoming iWatch. But for now, Apple health products are all about the HealthKit platform, playing nicely with other fitness and medical sensors and providing the single point of access where all your digital medical information is stored.

As Apple says in its promo material for the Apple health products introduced at WWDC: “Heart rate, calories burned, blood sugar, cholesterol — your health and fitness apps are great at collecting all that data.”

In other words, it’s less interested in competing directly against the growing ecosystem of health and fitness apps and sensors than in being the single point of access for this health technology and its data. When it comes to potential medical applications for the health-related information it’s storing, Apple’s approach may also help it to avoid the complication of possibly having to deal with FDA approval for a sensor that gets classified as a medical device.

If the company can replicate the success of its iOS app store and the huge market for iOS-compatible accessories with HealthKit, AAPL investors may finally find one of those lucrative new sources of revenue they’ve been hoping for.

As of this writing, Brad Moon did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

Brad Moon has been writing for InvestorPlace.com since 2012. He also writes about stocks for Kiplinger and has been a senior contributor focusing on consumer technology for Forbes since 2015.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2014/06/apple-health-technology-aapl/.

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