WebMD Relaunches iPhone App as a Hub for Fitness Data

The updated WebMD WBMD +4.34% iPhone app can pair with fitness bands such as the Jawbone Up in order to collect your exercise data.

 

Nathan Olivarez-Giles/The Wall Street Journal

Health apps and fitness trackers can be a bit of a mess nowadays—and in that mess WebMD sees an opportunity. You might have a fitness band with a corresponding app, another app for tracking runs or bike rides, and yet another to track what you’re eating each day. On Monday, WebMD updated its iPhone app to be a catch-all for the data produced by different wearables, as well as a daily fitness tracker and health minder.

WebMD has added a new “Healthy Target” section to its flagship iPhone app (but not yet to the Android version). The app already has two other parts: “Health Tools,” providing explanations symptoms, illnesses and medical terms, as well as local listings for doctors, pharmacies and hospitals; and “Healthy Living,” a daily lifestyle magazine offering tips on exercise, beauty, food and relationships.

Healthy Target can pull in data from devices made by Entra, Fitbit, Jawbone, Telcare and Withings—everything ranging from fitness bands to Web-connected bathroom scales. (One glaring exception: It’s not compatible with any Nike NKE +0.72% products.) The app can also use your iPhone to track steps—something I’ve been doing for the last week.

The app helps you set simple goals—lose weight, eat healthier, be more active, sleep better. To help you reach these goals, WebMD recommends certain “habits.” One example: “Tone up before tuning in,” a suggestion to do 10 jumping jacks, five squats and five pushups before turning on your TV each evening. An interactive calendar lets you tell the app whether or not you’re following through. You can add or remove habits at any time, but the object here is to bring about an actual lifestyle change.

The new Healthy Target section of WebMD’s iPhone app combines daily goals with your own fitness data.

 

WebMD

For the data-driven, there are plenty of bar charts and graphs to make sense of your sleep, steps, weight and blood sugar over time. Daily and weekly recaps let you know whether or not you’re reaching your goals. After using the latest version of the app, I found Healthy Target to be only as effective as you let it be. You can ignore Healthy Target in its entirety or you can let it become as addictive as Twitter or Instagram.

The app isn’t very attractive from a user interface or design perspective, but it’s easy to use and informative and certainly worth looking at if you’re looking for a central place to make sense of your fitness data. While it works with many brands of fitness bands, it doesn’t work with other fitness apps such as RunKeeper or Strava. If you use them a lot, WebMD could complicate your life by giving you yet another app to look at. But it could also simplify your life by being the one go-to app.

A big plus is that WebMD is well known in the health care industry; it’s not just some startup that you’ve never heard of, out to gather your data for who-knows-what. But Apple,  Samsung and—reportedly—Google are all working on major efforts to gather and manage data from the next generation of smart watches and fitness gear—and a host of health and fitness apps.

Samsung has said that it not only wants to be a central hub for health data, it wants to store your health data in the cloud and serve it to other apps and devices. Already a smart watch pioneer, Samsung also says it wants to lead the way in the development of new wearable sensors and devices. Apple’s approach involves aggregating data from wearable sensors and devices, too. However, rather than hosting and serving data, Apple will likely focus on getting devices and apps to communicate with one another. Google’s unannounced health initiative will likely follow a similar path.