Google Health Connect app walkthrough: How to use it to find all your health and fitness stats in one place

Google has released the Health Connect app via the Play Store. The app is currently in beta but it is usable and comes with a meaningful proposal. Google has partnered with Samsung to introduce this app that couples popular health and fitness apps under one umbrella along with easily-accessible privacy toggles. We have installed the app on our Android phone and let’s walk you through its interface and see whether Google’s vision makes sense.

Google Health Connect: Getting Started

You can download Health Connect from this link.

When you open the app, you will see two sections: 

App Permissions: Here, you can control which apps get to access the Health Connect data which includes things like heart rate, oxygen saturation, sleep, total calories burned, VO2 Max, weight, blood glucose, and basal metabolic rate 

Data and Access: Here, you can make changes to the data itself. They are sub-divided into categories such as activity, body measurements, cycle tracking, nutrition, sleep and vitals. 

There’s a separate section that shows the apps that have recently accessed Health Connect.

You can grant or revoke access to different apps from the App Permissions section. 

You can manually delete all data within Health Connect. There is even the option to auto-delete all data.

From the look of it, these settings at one place seems like a good thing. Here’s why:

Google Health Connect: Benefits

• Health Connect aims to tackle the issue of fragmentation prevalent on Android as all of the Health Connect supported apps will be accessible at a place. 
• Developers don’t have to cook multiple API connections to sync data between different apps. 
• "With Health Connect APIs, our engineers were able to easily adapt their existing architecture in order to read and write user health data such as nutrition, hydration, exercise, and steps. With this integration, we're now able to consume data from any 3rd party application that also writes to Health Connect, expanding our users' choices while allowing them more flexibility to grant granular permissions about which data they want to share," says Jason Peterson, Chief Technology Officer of MyFitnessPal.
• Since all permissions can be tweaked from one place, things become more convenient for the users too.

So far, Health Connect supports 10+ apps like Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, etc. You can download them from Google Play Store. 

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G. S. Vasan

Vasan is a word weaver and tech junkie who is currently geeking out as a news writer at Digit. View Full Profile