At its World Wide Developers Conference, Apple unveiled Health Kit, which is a new framework for managing a user's health information. Essentially, Health Kit creates a central data store for a person's health information.
While Apple may unveil a smartwatch or other wearable device in the future -- it was widely reported on Friday that it's aiming for an October event to launch a werable -- for the time being Apple's strategy centers on creating a central hub through Health Kit to get a clearer picture of medical health.
What's interesting about the wearables space in these early stages is the divergent approaches companies are taking. Samsung has been pushing its Galaxy Gear smartwatch and recently replaced Android with Tizen, an open-source alternative to Android it has been developing.
In Google's case, the company has released a version of Android named Android Wear for use in wearables. Many of the wearable concepts using Android Wear feature screens that display select information and notifications. Google has spent considerable resources on products like Google Now, which is an intelligent personal assistant. Essentially, it aims to show you only the most relevant information at a glance, such as upcoming meetings with directions or scores from your favorite sports teams.
With wearables having small screen sizes that can display only limited information, it makes sense that Google would make a big bet on expertise built through products like Google Now to show only the most contextual information. Likewise, Apple's development of Health Kit might be an alternative vision of the wearables market. Very specialized health devices needing no screens send their data to the smartphone, where all the processing and real "smarts" is done.
In the following video, The Motley Fool's Alison Southwick talks to Fool tech analyst Eric Bleeker about how Google and Apple's visions of wearables could differ in these early innings of wearable technology.
