Health & Fitness Google Developer Newsletter - May 2025 | Community

The first issue of the Health & Fitness Google Developer Newsletter!

Health Connect Updates - Jetpack SDK Beta released and new features

The beta version of the Health Connect Jetpack SDK is now available. This exciting milestone reflects the platform's stability, dependability, and continued growth. We've also introduced the following enhancements to Health Connect:

Background & History Reads: New permissions allow for a comprehensive view of users' health and wellness history. Learn more here.
Medical Record APIs: Enable your applications to access and contribute medical record data such as allergies, medications, immunizations, and lab results. Learn more here.
Metadata Enhancements: The Beta SDK requires that data writers specify their recording methods and the device type for automatically recorded data. Learn more here.

Discover the improved SDK and other Health Connect updates on our blog.

Check it out

Health Connect Toolbox - Expanded Testing Capabilities

Health Connect Toolbox is a tool that helps you test your app's integration with Health Connect. Key improvements include:

Route Reading for Exercise Sessions: You can now read exercise routes from other apps using ExerciseSessionRecord within the Toolbox. Simply grant route access permissions.
Training Plans Support: Introducing PlannedExerciseSessionRecords! Read and write training plans to empower users in achieving their fitness goals.

Start testing now

Upcoming Deprecation - `BODY_SENSORS` Permissions in Android 16 and Wear OS 6

We recently announced the upcoming deprecation of the android.permission.BODY_SENSORS and android.permission.BODY_SENSORS_BACKGROUND permissions in the next major Android and Wear OS releases (API level 36).

What this means for your app:

If your app currently requests these permissions, check whether they are still necessary. For apps targeting API 36, these permissions will be replaced by more granular permissions within the android.permissions.health group, currently used by Health Connect.

Migration Guidance:

For real-time (while-in-use) monitoring of specific health data like Heart Rate, SpO2, or Skin Temperature: Instead of BODY_SENSORS, you should request the relevant granular READ_ permissions (e.g., android.permission.READ_HEART_RATE, android.permission.READ_SPO2, android.permission.READ_SKIN_TEMPERATURE).
For accessing sensor data in the background: Replace BODY_SENSORS_BACKGROUND with the android.permission.READ_HEALTH_DATA_IN_BACKGROUND permission.

Migrate now

Wear OS

The Wear Health Service API will graduate to stable version on May 7, 2025. For more information, check out the Health Services on Wear OS page.

Learn more

Accelerating Healthcare AI Development with New Models

We're expanding our Health AI Developer Foundations (HAI-DEF) suite with two powerful new models:

TxGemma: A fine-tuned version of Gemma2 optimized for therapeutics tasks
HeAR: A health acoustic foundation model designed for efficient representation of nonsemantic respiratory sounds, enabling AI to classify coughs and breathing sounds.

These join our existing offerings of embeddings models for digital pathology, dermatology and chest x-rays. These models are all open-weight and feature tutorials on how to use them for specific use-cases.

Learn more

Health & Fitness Google Developer Event 2025

The Google team has been on a roadshow connecting with the developer community in person across several key cities. The tour has visited New York, San Francisco, and London and has concluded with a final event in Tokyo in May.