At BUILD 2014, Nokia introduced Nokia SensorCore including an SDK for developers. Nokia SensorCore allows applications to use the sensors in a Lumia phone without worrying about the battery life. The Nokia SensorCore SDK provides developers APIs to access step counter and activity information but also capabilities to record location data in a very low power mode. This opens up opportunity for advanced health and wellness related applications which can make use of accurate recording of location and your activities. From NokConv article,
It will know when you’re walking, running, or anything else that involves your location and how you move about in it. Potentially, your phone could be programmed to perform a certain task when specific criteria are met.
For example, your phone could automatically calculate how many calories you burn when doing your usual jog on Monday morning or when window shopping in a local mall. Your phone will be able to show you how much time you have spent at your workplace during the week.
Now, what is much more interesting is a tip from one of our dear friend with knowledge about certain Nokia plans. He mentions that SensorCore is just the first building block what may shape up as wider cross-platform health and wellness related service offerings of new Nokia in future. He mentions,
This is just the beginning of Nokia packages developed at NRC and part of previous Nokia wellness business unit. This will be foundation of broader health care cross platform services Nokia shall be introducing in coming quaters.
Which is a real good news, considering Nokia’s reluctance in tapping all the major platforms with its services offerings. I am still not able to understand, why fully-featured HERE Maps app is missing from iOS, a platform where it can really emerge as better Google Maps alternative. Nokia perhaps can take some inspiration from Microsoft here.
Anyways, slowly we are learning more about Nokia’s future plans, which looks really interesting with plans for smart watches and cross-platform consumer services.
