Google, Fitbit collaboration to spur digital healthcare

Taking another stride in the digital healthcare segment, Google announced its collaboration with Fitbit to help drive positive health outcomes at scale.

The collaboration comes at a time when ace competitors Amazon and Apple are venturing deeper into the digital healthcare space.

"As I've shared in the past, Google Cloud's vision for the healthcare industry is very much a reflection of Google's overall mission. We're building healthcare-specific products and solutions as well as supporting a growing partner ecosystem to help companies organise healthcare data in a way that is accessible and interoperable, but also secure, enabling them to create a positive and lasting impact on human health," Gregory J. Moore, Vice President of Healthcare at Google Cloud wrote in a blog post.

With the partnership in place across wearables and digital health, Fitbit has chosen Google Cloud as their preferred cloud provider and will be using the Cloud Healthcare API to provide an interoperability solution that enables their users to collaborate on care with their own healthcare providers.

Furthermore, the two companies are looking to explore how Google Cloud's machine learning APIs can help uncover deeper insights to benefit users.

So far, Fitbit, known for its fitness wearable gadgets, has sold more than 76 million devices, built a community of more than 25 million active users and possesses one of the world's largest health and fitness databases.

With the new collaboration, the two parties aim to revolutionise the healthcare sector by helping users use Google Cloud to access their records, thereby making it easier to bring better healthcare facilities to individuals.