[Music] this is Twit well Apple’s working on an iOS application that will almost certainly ship with iOS and may be called Healthbook this passbook like app will apparently focus on fitness tracking and healthcare monitoring 95 Max Mark German posted a detailed analysis the best coverage of this app by far that I’ve seen online uh and he published it this morning he joins us now to fill us in welcome Mark hi thanks for having me glad you’re here what is HealthBook and what will it be able to do so HealthBook is an application for the iPhone that Apple has been developing and I first detailed it in January it would be a application with several different uh cards kind of like on Passbook but instead of like movie tickets and boarding passes it’s uh your vital signs and different fitness uh statistics so you’ll have like a blood work folder folder to check glucose levels one to check blood sugar which is glucose folder talking about nutrition sleep tracking uh the activity tag the one tab in orange is mostly like a pedometer tells you steps calories burned miles walked and then there’s some more interesting stuff that a lot of companies haven’t really tackled in the tech space such as blood pressure uh respiratory rate oxygen saturation uh heart rate all sorts of stuff so it’s really expansive and advanced the thing that jumped out to me at me when I saw this is where are they getting this data i mean how are they measuring hydration levels how are they measuring some of the stuff the glucose levels obviously uh it’s not going to be just the iPhone here right that’s the million-dollar question so I think there’s four different possibilities about where data can come from uh the first would be the the iPhone itself the M7 could you know uh in the new iPhone 5S and iPad Air could technically work like a pedometer and tell you steps and calories and all that other information can come from the whole ecosystem of iPhone connected health accessories there’s Wi-Fi enabled scales on the market there’s Bluetooth blood pressure checkers there’s devices that can measure your glucose levels um but you know as you said hydration oxygen respiratory rate that’s some really advanced stuff that hasn’t really been done before so the answer to that question is probably a future Apple wearable device we know that Apple’s working on an eyewatch with advanced medical sensors so it’s probably very likely that that watch will be able to fill in the gaps that the existing accessories on the market and the iPhone chips can’t do itself now Harry you’ve been you’ve been following Apple for for a long time and I’m sure you’ve been following the wearables and also the fact that Apple has been hiring people in the medical uh area does this uh does this whole um app scream to you of an eyewatch that’s going to be sensing uh biometric data well when Mark reports something about Apple I take it a lot more seriously than I do when when many sites report about Apple so um I mean it kind of makes sense we we’ve you know it seems like for a long time now we’ve been sitting around thinking that Apple is probably working on something wearable but one of the challenges about figuring out wearable stuff is so much of it doesn’t quite make sense it’s not clear why Apple would want to put something on your wrist um and we have not seen a smartwatch from another company that that really feels like it could be the next iPod but this health stuff is really important and it it is an area where if Apple chose to they could do things that nobody has done yet and there do seem to be some you know pieces of the puzzle in place that indicate they might be working on something in this area it rings true in a way that some of the other possible wearable stuff is has not it absolutely does and and it’s it’s kind of stunning because we started hearing about smart watches you know a few years ago and everybody expected them to be sort of notifications the same thing that shows up on your phone on your on your uh on your on your clothes screen and so on uh and it’s kind of veering toward this sort of medical thing the coolest watch coming out of Samsung for example looks to be one of these bracelets rather than a big wristwatch and uh you we started hearing that Apple was getting very serious about you know people always categorized it as a kind of quantified self thing but this is hardcore medical equipment that that they’re talking about here blood sugar level and you know this sounds like life-saving uh applications for diabetics and things like that it’s it’s kind of astonishing to see them go uh into this kind of hardcore medical stuff because of course Apple is in the business of very widespread mainstream type of devices harry what do you think is this is this a surprising uh uh sort of uh left turn into the world of of medicine for Apple well um I mean already the iPhone has become a really interesting device for medical stuff and you’ve seen lots and lots of of uh startups and sometimes big companies use it as as a portal for health stuff not just doing stuff like blood sugar but also hearing aids that that are tweaked to work well with an iPhone i mean it is potentially a huge business in a way that a smartwatch doesn’t feel like it’s a huge business on its own i also think it’s intriguing that Apple looks like it’s building a really robust iPhone application to serve as the interface because because one question I always have about any kind of wearable is is Apple likes to do beautiful screens and Apple also likes to give you long battery life that’s a huge challenge with a wearable device and I sort of wonder whether this might be an indication that that instead of doing the beautiful interface on on the wearable device itself it’s going to let the iPhone be the beautiful screen and uh and the device just be the data collector yeah so Mark I’m intrigued by the fact that this appears to need third-party support pretty widespread 30 third party support from all kinds of hardware and software uh makers all kinds of sensor uh devices and so on but I’m also intrigued by some of these things which appear to be doable by the iPhone itself without help from third parties one of them for example is the sleep monitor there are ways to do that i think there’s a a real possibility that they’re going to figure out a way for the iPhone to listen to you snoring or something like that and figure out what your sleep cycles are what do you think is a lot of this going to be done by the iPhone by itself right so I think there’s a bunch of functionality there like I said in terms of the pedometer tracking like you said with the sleep that could be done with the iPhone hardware already in your pocket but if you look at that application there is a whole you know sort of different health and fitness statistics that are going to be tracked by healthbook that can’t certainly can’t be done with by the iPhone and there’s also ones that certainly can’t be done by any existing accessories so there’s that hole there where the theory breaks where you have to have something to step in because you know if Apple’s building the software for something they’re also you know looking for the hardware side because that application does absolutely nothing if it doesn’t have the hardware to make it happen whether that hardware is in an iPhone on you know Apple’s online store where they’re selling a bunch of iPhone connected fitness accessories or an Apple bracelet or eyewatch that’s to be seen but I think the picture is very clear at this point that they’re moving towards the health and fitness direction and they’re going to end in a way that’s really going to destroy the market and about your point earlier about Apple entering the medical space you know right now it kind of seems niche to have a hospital on your wrist but you know there was a time where tablets were very niche as well there was a time where having a computer in your pocket was unthinkable there was a time where people were carrying out CD players and MP3 players were just 15 songs um in this huge little box so just like Apple transformed those industries I think that the next big insight could be transforming you know society and the health industry so I think it’s time for the next big thing and I think it’s pretty clear what that’s going to be from Apple well thank you for coming on Tech News today Mark i appreciate your story and everybody should go read it because it’s very very detailed and very thorough and I appreciate that thanks so much all right you can find Mark at 9to5mmac.com and also on Twitter at Mark German his last name is spelled guan