Apple acquires digital-health startup Gliimpse
Apple has taken another step into the digital health-care sector by acquiring personal health data start-up Gliimpse, which creates "personalised, shareable electronic health records" for patients. Apple also recently acquired machine learning platform Turi for $200m as the company continue to broaden its focus.
Allana Akhtar

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — One of Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths is taking a step further into digital medicine.

Apple quietly acquired the personal health data start-up Gliimpse, according to a report from Fast Company.

Gliimpse takes a patient’s medical records and uses coding to produce a personalized, shareable electronic health record. Anil Sethi, a former systems engineer at Apple with a master’s of science from Johns Hopkins, founded the start-up in 2013, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Apple did not immediately respond for comment.

The Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant has been expanding into digital health since releasing its HealthKit app — which helps users monitor personal health and fitness data — with the iPhone 6 in 2014. It also worked with hospitals and doctors to create a research-tracking app for common diseases like Parkinson’s and breast cancer, and allowed anyone to become an organ donor using an iPhone.

The company may have also acquired the machine learning platform Turi for $200 million earlier this month.

Apple isn’t alone in pursuing AI for medicine. Google announced plans to use artificial intelligence to recognize the signs of common eye diseases using medical records of 1.6 million patients in London hospitals.

Despite Google, Facebook and other companies’ early ventures into artificial intelligence, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Apple led the industry in artificial intelligence with voice-controlled personal assistance Siri, released in 2011, and isn’t stopping anytime soon.

"(The) level of performance (in smartphones) is going to skyrocket" with coming leaps in artificial intelligence, Cook said in an interview with The Washington Post. "And there is nothing that’s going to replace it in the short term or in the intermediate term, either."