Skip to main content

Which Mobile Health Toolkit Should a Service Provider Choose? A Comparative Evaluation of Apple HealthKit, Google Fit, and Samsung Digital Health Platform

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Ambient Intelligence (AmI 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10217))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Mobile health applications are proliferating. Platform vendors have recently created programming toolkits to support developers. In many healthcare scenarios, mobile health applications are only the end-point of a larger supervised service involving many stakeholders. We want to know how these toolkits support the delivery of such services. Using a case study approach, we study three cases of such platforms and toolkits, i.e. Apple HealthKit, Google Fit and Samsung Digital Health. We collected and analyzed data from blogs, online developer forums, toolkit documentations, and from our own programming of an example health application. We use the boundary resource model to analyze our data. Our findings show that each of the toolkits imposes, through its boundary resources, the business model of its vendor on service providers. This can have important strategic implications for health service providers who want to base their services on each of the three toolkits.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Tran, J., Tran, R., White, J.R.: Smartphone-based glucose monitors and applications in the management of diabetes. Clin. Diabetes 30, 173–178 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Farshchian, B.A., Dahl, Y.: The role of ICT in addressing the challenges of age-related falls: a research agenda based on a systematic mapping of the literature. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 19, 649–666 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. von Hippel, E., Katz, R.: Shifting innovation to users via toolkits. Manag. Sci. 48, 821–833 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Gay, V., Leijdekkers, P.: Bringing health and fitness data together for connected health care: Mobile apps as enablers of interoperability. J. Med. Internet Res. 17, e260 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Gavalas, D., Economou, D.: Development platforms for mobile applications- status and trends. IEEE Softw. 28, 77–86 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Anvaari, M., Jansen, S.: Evaluating architectural openness in mobile software platforms. In: 4th European Conference on Software Architecture, pp. 85–92 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Ghazawneh, A., Henfridsson, O.: Balancing platform control and external contribution in third-party development: the boundary resources model. Inf. Syst. J. 23, 173–192 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research: Design and Methods. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Astrup, P., Jansen, E.G., Aksic, N.: Empirical evaluation of commercial health toolkits. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway (2015)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

We thank Petter Astrup, Erik G Jansen, and Nemanja Aksic for the collection of data used in our analysis. This paper is partly supported by the Norwegian Research Council project ADAPT (Grant Agreement No. 317631) and the EU Horizon 2020 project MyCyFAPP (Grant Agreement No. 643806).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Babak A. Farshchian .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Farshchian, B.A., Vilarinho, T. (2017). Which Mobile Health Toolkit Should a Service Provider Choose? A Comparative Evaluation of Apple HealthKit, Google Fit, and Samsung Digital Health Platform. In: Braun, A., Wichert, R., Maña, A. (eds) Ambient Intelligence. AmI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10217. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56997-0_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56997-0_12

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-56996-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-56997-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics