Apple wants to make it easier to share your wellness data. The company has filed for a patent (number 20220262509) for a “wellness aggregator.”
About the patent filing
In the patent filing, Apple notes that approximately 133 million Americans currently suffer from at least one chronic condition. This number is expected to rise to approximately 165 million by the year 2020. Apple says that, as a result, the cost of healthcare in the U.S. is expected to increase dramatically. Attempts have been made to improve the health of individuals by providing them with tools to monitor and track their wellness data. Wellness data can generally include any type of data associated with a person’s health, such as their weight, heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose level, medication compliance, activity level, or the like. Users can monitor their wellness using devices, such as blood pressure cuffs, blood glucose monitors, electrocardiograms, step counters, and the like.
Software applications (e.g., Apps) associated with each of these devices have also been developed to allow users to track their wellness data over time. Apple says that while each application can be used to view useful information about a user’s health, current applications are limited in their ability to allow users to store, view, and share wellness data collected by different devices. The company wants to make it easier to share your wellness data.
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing: “The present disclosure relates to aggregating and sharing wellness data. The wellness data can be received by a user device from any number of sensors external or internal to the user device, from a user manually entering the wellness data, or from other users or entities. The user device can securely store the wellness data on the user device and transmit the wellness data to be stored on a remote database.
“A user of the device can share some or all of the wellness data with friends, relatives, caregivers, healthcare providers, or the like. The user device can further display a user’s wellness data in an aggregated view of different types of wellness data. Wellness data of other users can also be viewed if authorizations from those users have been received.”
