Apple is reportedly working on building a “full health and fitness
services platform,” which would resemble and be modelled on its App
Store software marketplace, according to a new report by Reuters. Apple is also said to be ramping up its hiring of health tech and hardware experts, which is an ongoing trend that’s been noticed by other observers in the past.
The latest hire at Apple is StartX Med founder Divya Nag, who created
the Stanford-backed startup accelerator to foster and grow companies
and entrepreneurs that want to build technology (including software and
hardware) related to health and medicine. Other recent hires include
Masimo Corp chief medical officer Michael O’Reilly, Vital Connect VP of
biosensor technology Ravi Narasimhan, embedded sensors expert Nima
Ferdosi and a few others, too.
Apple’s hiring spree is said to be about talent, not necessarily any
specific tech from the companies these people were poached from. It’s
about building an iWatch, which will reportedly have health tracking
features, but it’s also more broadly about building a health platform.
Other companies, including Apple rival Samsung, have built their own
health and fitness platforms to help convince people to buy their
devices over those of others, but mostly these feel half-baked. There’s
still plenty of opportunity to build something mature and complete, and
it makes sense to roll up all the energy going into building startup
software and hardware health products.
Rumors have been swirling about Nike dropping its hardware efforts in
favor of partnering with Apple on deeper integration between their
software and Apple devices, and that could be something that does indeed
signal a wider platform push. An App Store for health sounds like
something that doesn’t necessarily to be broken out from the main
product, but at this stage, it’s too early to tell how similar or
different such a project might be.
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