San Francisco, Nov 15 (IANS): Google has announced that its Health Connect app is available to download as a public beta via the Play Store.

Also, more than 10 health and fitness apps have launched integrations with Health Connect, including Fitbit, Samsung Health, Google Fit, MyFitnessPal, Oura, Peloton and more.

The purpose of Health Connect is to provide centralised access to health and fitness data from various eligible apps, Google said in a blogpost.

"With Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration," it added.

The app syncs health and fitness data from qualifying platforms enables other apps to access this data with the user's permission and gives users access to centralised privacy controls.

Google said that Health Connect offers a standardised data format that covers more than 40 data types across six categories.

The scheme covers a wide range of use cases, from exercises to sleep tracking to vital signs.

Previously, users had to switch between several apps to manage data permissions in the past, and developers had to build out permissions management UIs themselves.

Therefore, with Health Connect, users can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time, according to the blogpost.