It's hard not to view Google as an 800-pound gorilla, beating competitors at every turn thanks to its vast mountains of cash and engineering talent. But there's one field where the Mountain View-based search giant has frequently stumbled: repeated attempts to build a foothold in the biomedical realm have either failed or not borne fruit yet. Now it's trying again.
Earlier today, Bloomberg Business reported that Google is developing what it calls a "health-tracking wristband"—in other words, a fitness band. But this one isn't going to be marketed at the general public. Nope, Google's aiming for the academic crowd, and wants the device to be used in clinical research. Based on Google's history, should we expect it to catch on?
The history starts back in 2008 with Google Health. Aimed squarely at Microsoft's HealthVault, Google Health was a patient-level electronic medical record. It was designed to be one-stop shop in the cloud (before we called it that) where users could store their medical records, prescription records, and other important health data. We were skeptical of Google Health's prospects for longevity back then, and so it proved three years later when Google Health went the way of Google Reader—albeit without anything like the same public outcry.
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