Last week at The Checkup, Google Health announced they will make more of Fitbit's Health Metrics Dashboard free for all non-subscribers. This will include trends for breathing rate, heart rate, skin temperature, oxygen saturation, and resting heart rate. When these trends are different from the user’s norm, non-subscribers will receive info from the platform.

While this is great news for those who use Fitbit to track their fitness and health goals, the free info being offered is only the tip of the iceberg. And we don’t like to brag (or maybe we do!), but at Folia, we’ve been providing our users with free, comprehensive health reports and graphs since our inception six years ago.

Folia is a web and mobile application that allows users to track and monitor their health and wellness goals. The app provides users with comprehensive reports that include customizable graphs, charts, and statistics that help users understand where their health is at. Folia users have always had access to these graphs for free, without any subscription fees.

Unlike Fitbit, which is primarily focused on fitness tracking, Folia is designed to track all aspects of a user's health, including symptoms, medications, condition triggers, nutrition, hydration, sleep, and mental health. Folia users can track their food intake, water consumption, and sleep patterns, as well as their mood and emotions.

Folia's free app is not just about providing users with pretty free graphs and charts. We’ve also listened to our user community and are gearing up to give back. The Canopy Series, our first ever User Driven Research will launch in the next couple of weeks. If we think of each Folia user as one tree, this project will create a beautiful forest canopy of insights from the aggregate data (only with user permission as always!)

For anyone on the Folia app participating, it will give us the opportunity to provide answers to some of these common user questions:

What are the most common symptoms other people with my condition experience?
What do other patients do to prevent flares?
What treatments are working for other people with my condition?
What kinds of lifestyle activities are others doing to help with their condition?
And more

We are excited to provide this high value research back to the Folia community and to see how this free gift impacts the health journey of our users.

Folia's commitment to providing users with free health tools is not just about saving users money. Our team believes that access to and ownership of health data is a basic human right and that everyone should have tools and resources that can help them improve their health and well-being. In a world where healthcare costs continue to rise, Folia's commitment to free health tracking tools is more important than ever. Folia is helping to democratize healthcare and empower people to take control of their own health and wellness.

So while Google's decision to make some of Fitbit’s health information free for all users is a positive development, they’re a little late to the party that Folia has been throwing for the last six years!

Free graphs? Ok Google, that's old news at Folia!