Apple HealthKit's Tricks: The Lift, The Leap, and The Stumble

Apple is up to its old tricks again, and has added a new one.

The recent debut of its HealthKit, which is described as a platform for health and fitness apps and is scheduled to be released with iOS 8, stepped on a few toes with its apparent appropriation from another company.

That isn't new. As Seth Fiegerman reminds us on Mashable.com, the very name of Apple was once the subject of some contention with the Beatles' Apple record label. And iPhone was originally a trademark of Cisco.

They had to travel all the way to Australia to lift the name HealthKit, according to Melbourne-based startup co-founders Alison Hardacre and Lachlan Wheeler. The pair say they launched their HealthKit company in 2012.

Speaking with the (London) Daily Mail MailOnline's Daniel Mills about the alleged copyright infringement, Hardacre said, "We won't let them trample over our product ... someone needs to be fired for this. We have a business with the same name and a similar product; if they had done a quick Google search they (Apple) would have seen that. It's not fair." She also told Mills that repeated attempts to contact the company have gone unanswered.

Still, it seems that Apple's HealthKit is the tool that will allow developers to build apps, and is not an app itself.

Apple's other old trick is the leap. In this case, it's the leap of integrating the numerous measurables and uses to which those measurables might be put onto one platform so that all the apps on the platform might share the same data.

In his explanation of what HealthKit is and what it's supposed to do, Mashable's Lance Ulanoff wrote, "HealthKit is designed to handle simple health data entry, statistical analysis of health data and to allow applications from Health providers to sync data to personal medical records."

According to Ulanoff, "Programmers build their apps using HealthKit to collect this data direct from people, who enter it when they open HealthKit-enabled apps, and from third-party services and devices that either have the HealthKit code written into them or are HealthKit enabled." He continnued, "HealthKit even has event monitoring built in, so it can observe and report on changes to the user through the HealthKit-enabled app."

And the new trick is the stumble. As Aaron Rowe reported on Rock Health, mistakes were made in the HealthKit unveiling. According to Rowe, a slide that appeared toward the end of the HealthKit presentation displayed four key metrics for diabetes management: glucose, carbs, walking, and diabetes medication adherence. So far, so good.

But, Rowe wrote, "The numbers and units that Apple used as examples to illustrate their vision don't make sense. When you measure your glucose with a personal blood sugar meter, it is measured in mg/dL-- but the example shown by Apple displayed these numbers in mL/dL. Whoops!"

To compound the mistake, Rowe said, "What's worse, the app screen features an SMS-style message from a particularly photogenic doctor who says, 'You're making great progress with your diet and exercise. Keep it up.'" This, he says, appears "(w)hile the graph above this message shows a steady and very unhealthy looking uptrend in the user's glucose readings."

While this was just a demo, Rowe said, "It strikes me as particularly unusual that Apple would make these mistakes, since they are known for their intense attention to detail."

Stephen Levy is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.