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Five Great Health Tracking Apps for Android Smartwatches

— Android Wear touts a variety of healthcare apps and more on Google Play that make the platform even more convenient for your day-to-day life.

MedpageToday

In a guest post, Steven Chan, MD, reviews several useful apps for the Android smartwatch.

-- which had nearly a year's head start in front of Apple Watch -- touts a that make the platform even more convenient for your day-to-day life.

In fact, any Android app that uses Android notifications will pop up automatically on Android. This makes it quite handy, for instance, to follow medical Twitter feeds, get alerts from colleagues, and send emails and text messages to them.

My experience over the past year with my Samsung Gear Live watch has been very positive. I've been able to manage flights, scheduling, messaging, and more from my wrist -- and even get some advice from Johns Hopkins' and follow . Even Evernote is available to capture, display, and search notes on Android Wear.

With the Apple Watch's imminent release, Android Wear smartwatches have gone on discount. Android Wear's apps can do a variety of things for medicine as well.

Here are several more medical apps that you can now use with your Android Wear smartwatch.

Blood glucose tracking

can track blood sugars based on the timing of your meals. In fact, it lets you tag events and reactions to exercise and types of foods as well. The app provides time-based statistics, filtering by events and tags, sharing data to Dropbox and care providers, and even track medications. Its Android Wear app specifically allows users to speak their blood sugars into their smart watch.

Another app, , similarly allows granular logging of diets and nutrition info with its user-customizable food database, medication dosages, blood sugars. The app takes in imported data from Medtronic CareLink, Abbott CoPilot, LifeScan OneTouch, Nipro TRUEmanager, Accu-Chek, Tandem t:connect, Bayer Glucofacts and OnTrack exported files -- and even CSV files. People with diabetes can use this information to calculate insulin dosages.

Read the .

Dr. Chan () is a resident physician in psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California Davis School of Medicine, and is currently an American Psychiatric Association (APA) and Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) MFP Fellow. He is researching asynchronous telepsychiatry and mobile healthcare applications. Steve previously worked as a visual designer and software engineer at both Microsoft and the University of California Berkeley.