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

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.