Healthbook: Apple Reportedly Working on Wellness-Tracking App

9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman has a big scoop on Healthbook, the wellness-tracking app that Apple is reportedly building into iOS 8:

How would users log all of this data? Gurman lays out a few potential ways:

On a basic level, Healthbook makes sense. The fitness tracking business is booming, with an estimated $330 million in sales last year, according to The NPD Group. While there are plenty of fitness devices on the market already, Apple could surpass them by collecting more types of data, painting a bigger overall picture of users’ health.

But if you’re not someone who wants to obsess over fitness minutia, or needs to monitor a specific health condition, I’m not sure all that data collection is helpful on its own. The bigger challenge for Apple will be to transform that data into features that make our lives better.

Here’s an example: A couple years ago, I reviewed a sleep-tracking device that connected to an iPhone or iPad. It was fascinating for a few days, as I woke up eager to learn about the quantity and duration of my sleep. But while the device worked well from a technical standpoint, the process of tracking my sleep eventually grew tiresome. Seeing my sleep patterns in chart form was, at best, a reminder to go to sleep earlier — not exactly a life-changing revelation — and, at worst, an additional source of stress.

Still, this device did have a couple truly useful features: It could play music until it recognized that I’d fallen asleep, and it would try to wake me up during a light sleep cycle so I’d feel less exhausted. Instead of just spitting my sleep charts back at me, the tracker used what it knew to help me fall asleep and wake up.

We know that Healthbook could potentially collect lots of data, but that’s only part of the equation. How Apple would apply that data would ultimately determine Healthbook’s usefulness.