Google has reached its’s parent company Alphabet’s $121 billion cash reserves to spend $2.1 billion on Fitbit. This is an initiative into key consumer health markets, which has directly made them compete against Apple. Since last one-year Fitbit and Google are the partners on healthcare applications, which were announced in April that Fitbit will work along with Google’s application programming interface to connect data with electronic medical records via Google’s Cloud Healthcare API.
Previously, the following move was preceded by the acquisition of Twine Health, an initiative taken by the Fitbit in February 2018. Twine health gives the wearable company a consumer health platform that is updated from existing federal regulations. The Fitbit CEO and the co-founder James Park during their partnership stated that they are extremely excited to work with Google. They can grab larger opportunities for their advantages and transformation of business and an enhanced business would help in reaching out to people faster.
Through healthcare applications, companies can get directly connected to the patients. Moreover, such advanced technologies also influence people to take healthcare measures prior to any disease threats diagnosed rather than searching and running offline.
Though, most of us the same thing of having the utmost care, while health is a regular thing for us which needs to be managed every day by not neglecting ourselves rather than falling in this wasteful health managerial system said by a healthcare executive at multinational medical device manufacturer.
Privacy Concerns
With this movement between the partners, the first thing is to secure the healthcare application and maintain the privacy of various health records of patients. While these industries have the habit of publicizing everything for their own advantage, Fitbit proposed that no data of patients shall be released in Google ads for publicity.
Rather, users will get access to their own reviews if they want to edit, update or remove. Apart from this the rival, Apple is setting its emphasis more on the privacy part to grab this extra position amongst all.
