"Up next for Apple: health tracking?" by Brian X. Chen | New York Times June 02, 2014
SAN FRANCISCO — Many smart appliances already exist, but Apple could introduce tool kits for developers that would allow apps to more easily communicate with appliances, which could make the connected home systems simpler for consumers to set up.
Health monitors and smart home devices are still niche categories....
“Apple always has the potential to turn a niche into a mainstream proposition when it enters a market,” said Jan Dawson, a Jackdaw Research analyst.
Apple will not be the first big company to bet on smarter health and home applications. Google in 2011 unveiled Android@Home, an effort to expand Android into appliances. It made little progress. Google’s acquisition of Nest, the smart-appliance maker, for $3.2 billion might revitalize that effort.
Samsung has also highlighted its efforts in the health space. In San Francisco last week, Samsung said it would provide developers, hardware makers, and medical professionals with a platform that would push forward the idea of “intelligent digital health.”
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Paul Haddad, maker of the Twitter app Tweetbot, said, “an Apple-provided health application will bring a lot more attention to the benefits that tracking your health data on a smartphone can provide,” he said....
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