“When your health and fitness apps work together, they become more powerful.”

That’s one of the values behind Health, Apple’s new app that unifies data from various fitness and wellness apps and devices into a central repository.

Health is designed to make it easier for people to review data generated by their various fitness, activity, and health trackers. It’s likely to make digital medical data management (glucose, respiratory rate, etc.) mainstream.

Health can also help developers fix some of the current problems with digital activity tracking. (See side note, “What is Activity Tracking?”)

The market for activity trackers is booming (both apps and wearables). However, there’s no hard evidence that they intrinsically help people move more or lose weight over time.

Also, more than half of U.S. consumers stop using their wearable activity tracker within six months of purchase. As few as six percent of people who’ve downloaded a fitness app report using it every day.

In this article on Medium, I explored five specific reasons that activity tracking is broken:

People mistake activity trackers for a strategy to move more (when they’re really just a tool to measure how much someone is moving).

People fail to develop the habit of using activity trackers.

The hands-off nature of digital feedback is easy to ignore.

Most of them lack scientifically tested motivational techniques.

The meaning of activity data isn’t always clear to the user.

Many of the problems with the current state of activity tracking can be summed up as:

Activity tracking has to get smarter before it can be effective.

How Apple’s Health and HealthKit Might Help

Apple’s Health app and HealthKit development tools weren’t expressly designed to fix the current problems with digital activity tracking.

However, there are specific ways this new platform can help address the problems outlined above. Here are five quick ones:

HealthKit lowers the barrier of entry to new developers with fresh approaches.

Since HealthKit handles much of the heavy lifting of data integration, new developers are likely to take an interest in this field.

This should spark development of creative new approaches to digital activity tracking. I expect to see more games and design-driven solutions.

2. HealthKit can make next-generation activity tracking apps smarter, by making integration with other apps and services easier.

HealthKit should make it easy to integrate activity tracking apps with other iOS-level services. Developers could build virtual activity coaches from contextual user data.

For example, imagine an app that pulls data from a user’s Frequent Locations, looks at nearby walking routes on Maps, and then references the user’s Calendar app to trigger a reminder for when and where a user could go for a quick walk.

Not having a strategy to become more active is a primary reason people fail to change habits and become more active over time. Contextual, digital coaching could help with this.

3. Health and HealthKit makes it easier for medical, wellness and health professionals to review client data to create individual activity plans.

There are many cases when human coaching is preferable to digital coaching.

Health makes it easier for professionals as diverse as doctors, fitness trainers, lifestyle coaches and wellness practitioners to review and analyze their client’s real-world data. This data can guide creation of personalized strategies to become more active.

In medical cases, activity data can even directly sync to a patient’s medical records.

4. Health makes activity data consistent, easier to understand, and more relevant for individual users.

Information overload and confusing metrics contributes to product abandonment. Health’s clean, unified interface should help with this.

People who use activity trackers often struggle to find personal meaning or guidance in the data they generate. By integrating activity data deeper in the OS, personalized motivational prompts can be generated from individual activity patterns.

5. Health raises the profile of activity tracking and makes it “stickier.”

Even without making activity tracking smarter, as suggested above, Health’s prominence in iOS 8 should compel more people to start tracking their physical activity (or lack of activity).

The app should also make tracking stickier for more users (As mentioned above, product abandonment is a major problem for activity trackers.)

For example, Health displays user activity data alongside user medical and health stats. People looking at their medical data won’t help but also notice their activity data.

Looking Forward

“iWatch” and the next generation of smart wearables are likely to be best solution for integrating habit-changing activity tracking into day-to-day life.

Unlike current single-function wearables, iWatch will likely bundle several useful features along with activity tracking into a single device. This helps solve product abandonment.

It also provides new opportunities for personalized feedback, digital coaching and improved user engagement.

I believe iWatch will have the same effect on digital health as the iPod had on digital music.

It remains to be seen if Health will become the equivalent of iTunes.

(Apple released iTunes months before the iPod was announced. Also, full disclosure: I love most of Apple’s products, but I despise iTunes.)

Finally, it’s interesting to consider who might build this next wave of smarter activity tracking apps. Will it be an established company like Nike or Fitbit?

Or will it be a startup that doesn’t even exist yet?