Joe Hindy / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Health Connect is adding support for a new category of data called mindfulness.
- Mindfulness consists of things like meditation, yoga classes, breathing sessions, and more.
- Support for reading and writing mindfulness data to Health Connect is available right now in Android 16 DP1 but will be coming to older versions soon.
If you use multiple different health and fitness tracking apps on Android but want to keep all your information in one place, then you’ll want to use Google Health Connect to aggregate your data. Health Connect is a service that simplifies data sharing between health and fitness apps so you can easily check up on your info as well as manage access to your data all in one place. However, apps can only share data that Google designed Health Connect to handle, so some entries, like those for your yoga and meditation sessions, haven’t yet been supported. Thankfully, that’s changing with the next version of Health Connect.
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When Google announced the first developer preview of Android 16 earlier this week, it highlighted a new version of Health Connect that adds support for medical data. Specifically, it said that Android 16 DP1 lets apps both read and write your medical data in Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) format. What Google didn’t say, though, is that Android 16 DP1 also adds new APIs that lets apps read and write mindfulness sessions.
Currently, Health Connect supports data types that fall under the following six categories: Activity, Body Measurement, Cycle Tracking, Nutrition, Sleep, and Vitals. The next version of Health Connect will introduce two new categories named Personal Health Records (PHR) and Mindfulness. The PHR category will consist of the aforementioned medical data like immunizations, lab records, and medications, while the Mindfulness category will consist of things like meditation sessions, yoga sessions, guided breathing sessions, stretches/movements, music/soundscapes, and finally any unguided session.
Apps can read mindfulness data stored in Health Connect if you grant them the new android.permission.health.READ_MINDFULNESS permission, while they can write that data to Health Connect if you grant them the new android.permission.health.WRITE_MINDFULNESS permission. These permissions grant access to Health Connect’s MindfulnessSessionRecord API, which is available in the latest version of Health Connect preloaded in Android 16 DP1 but will be coming to devices running Android 14 and later with an upcoming Google Play System Update.
In order to insert a mindfulness session, apps need to specify a start time, end time, and type for the session. They can optionally add a title and some notes to the session, which could be something apps automatically add themselves or something you specified when recording whatever mindfulness activity you participated in.
With each new release, Health Connect has become a more useful tool to aggregate your health and fitness data. For example, in the last release, Health Connect finally added support for backing up your health and fitness data. While you can argue that’s long overdue, it’s still great to see Google continue to make the service better, as it gives developers more reason to add support. That was one of the initial concerns with Health Connect when it launched in late 2022, after all, so I’m looking forward to seeing which new apps are interested in working with it once the new version with support for medical records and mindfulness sessions rolls out more widely.
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