NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, June 10, 2013

Mobile health has come a long way since the start of 2009 when Apple demonstrated on-stage at its World Wide Developer Conference how blood pressure monitors and blood glucose meters could connect to the iPhone 3G via cables or Bluetooth. MobiHealthNews has tracked health-related wearable devices from their infancy as research projects at university labs to the commercially available products they are today. The past three Consumer Electronics Shows, especially, have yielded a wide range of smartphone-enabled health and fitness devices, from smart forks to connected pulse oximeters and, of course, the numerous wearable activity trackers.

While it’s not yet fair to say that every wearable health-related device connects to smartphones, almost all of them have companion smartphone apps that display data collected by the device. The smartphone is the hub device for today’s wearable devices.

As we’re almost halfway through 2013, it seemed like a good time to stop and take a look back at the rise of smartphone-enabled health and fitness devices over the course of the past five years. Below is a comprehensive, but admittedly not exhaustive, timeline of important events and news announcements related to smartphone-enabled health and fitness devices.