Mountain View, California — Google on Wednesday released an upgraded Google Health that includes a new design and some new features and reminded the world that it has updated one of its lesser-used sites with a new look and feel with an increased focus on wellness.
Google Health is a very useful service that allows users to upload personal health information for tracking their overall health status over time and find all related stored information on health issues, doctors, and other medical accessible everywhere.
But Internet search engine giant Google has now unleashed a complete overhaul which, among other new features, enables you to track your “wellness” as well as your sickness. Google is also forging alliance with several companies to make it easier for users to access their data through an improved dashboard that also lets users track their fitness goals on Google Health.
“We have heard you ask for easier data tracking, more personalization and the ability to set and track progress toward your health goals,” Aaron Brown, Senior Product Manager for Google Health wrote.
First off is a new dashboard that integrates health and wellness information in one place. To streamline your fitness goals, Google partnered with Fitbit and CardioTrainer to incorporate their products into Google Health.
“Our new re-design better organizes your medical information, while creating a more welcoming place to set goals for yourself and check in daily on your progress,” Brown, wrote in a blog post.
“We have formulated an easier-to-use dashboard that combines together even more of your health and wellness information under one roof and simplifies it for you to organize and act on that information. We have also heard from you that focusing on wellness, and wellness goals, is a big part of the solution, and that it is important to record your daily experience and set goals,” he added.
“For instance, you might want to set a goal around walking more each day or to lower your cholesterol over time. With our new design, you can easily monitor your path to success with a visual graph that shows your progress towards your personalized goal. You can even create custom trackers for other things that you want to monitor like daily sleep, exercise, pregnancy or even how many cups of coffee you drink a day,” said Brown.
Google Health’s new dashboard allows people to add personal health goals and track their medications. (Credit: Google)
Google has also made alliance with new partners like Fitbit and CardioTrainer so users can collect data for monitoring their wellness. Fitbit for example, manufactures a wearable device that monitors various activities like how much you exercise, calories burned, and sleep quality. And all that data can now be easily transferred to Google Health.
CardioTrainer, meanwhile, is a mobile app for fitness and weight loss. “In the two weeks since CardioTrainer’s integration went live, CardioTrainer developer WorkSmart Labs reports that users have already uploaded more than 150,000 workouts to Google Health, where they can more easily view, track and set goals around their workouts and monitor them along with other health and wellness information,” says Brown.
On the medical front, the search engine leader has included the ability to take notes or keep a journal about a particular condition or medications you are taking. Google promised “information that is more personalized to your particular set of medical conditions or specific medications.”
Google tweaked the interface a bit as well, allowing users to hide items or sections that are old or outdated. Furthermore, anyone handling several medications, or parents of children with extensive medical needs, might be interested in a Web-based service that helps them organize their medical history and data in a single place that’s accessible from any browser.
Meanwhile, Google is endeavoring more to spread its wings into healthcare facilities. Google has most recently made associations with: Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Sharp HealthCare.
Nevertheless, Google Health does not really seem to have grasped on with the general public, as the idea of serving up your most private health details to a company with a professed thirst for data has to have made more than a few people think twice.
User Experience Researcher Hendrik Mueller has more about the new Google Health design here.