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Apple’s Watch may track your activity to encourage you to get fit, but the company’s devices could soon give you a much more detailed picture of your overall health.
Apple has acquired health data start-up Gliimpse, which lets users store, update and share their health data, Fast Company reported.
While the acquisition happened earlier this year, Apple has only just confirmed its purchase.
Gliimpse was founded in 2013 by Karthik Hariharan and Anil Sethi – a serial entrepreneur who started his career at Apple in the late 1980s. Sethi explained on his LinkedIn page that the company was created to help his little sister manage data connected with her breast cancer treatment.
“As a consumer of healthcare, I leave behind a bread-crumb-trail of medical info wherever I’ve been seen. But, I'm unable to easily access or share my own data,” he wrote.
While Sethi said Obamacare and other initiatives are forcing hospitals to hand over data to patients, there is "no single electronic health record that all physicians use...and worse, there isn’t even a file format across 1000+ systems.”
Gliimpse seeks to solve the problem by enabling patients to collect their medical history in an app that can be easily shared with medical professionals, friends and family.
“Our product collects data from medical portals – without human intervention – combined with self-entered plus wearable info, all shared with others, “ he wrote, adding partners can use it to build other consumer-facing apps.
The acquisition, made for an as-yet undisclosed sum, is expected to boost Apple’s efforts in digital health.
The Cupertino-based company has launched HealthKit, CareKit and ResearchKit in recent years to allow patients and researchers alike to access to fitness and health data, most notably via the Apple Watch. Gliimpse’s capabilities could add functionality to Apple’s existing products.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has bought a start-up called Genee to boost its artificial intelligence prowess. Co-founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, who plan to join Microsoft, started Genee in 2014 to simplify the time-consuming task of scheduling and rescheduling meetings.
"Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one," Outlook and Office 365 corporate vice president Rajesh Jha said in a blog post.
It can, for example, act as an assistant in an email exchange to sort out a time for a meeting. The technology is expected to be embedded in Microsoft’s Office 365 software
The Genee team will join Microsoft and its existing service will be discontinued.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
