More iOS apps are on the way to help with your health regimen

At the end of March, Apple announced a new feature coming alongside iOS 11.3, Health Records, which gave users access to their medical data and allowed them to share it with a running tally of hospitals and clinics. Today at WWDC, the company released an API for developers and researchers to make their own 'ecosystem of apps' to harness Health Records information, and implied that some would arrive as early as this fall.

This builds on the original vision of HealthKit, which provided self-reported and device-recorded data to developers. Now, devs can combine that with the user's Health Records information, which Apple envisions will help manage medications, diagnose diseases and track their nutrition. This is aimed to help folks better understand their health situation, but doctors can benefit from it, too. Instead of tedious questionnaires, they can just integrate patient medical data straight into their ResearchKit study apps (after patient approval, of course).

As we knew when it was introduced, Health Records data is encrypted on the user's iOS device and protected behind their passcode. If anyone choose to share that information with third-party apps, it flows to the latter directly from HealthKit -- not through Apple's servers.

Follow all the latest news from WWDC 2018 here!