Your health insurance might score you an Apple Watch

Apple will exclusively provide its Watch, iPad and iPhone products to Aetna for new app-oriented fitness tracking program, the US insurance giant announced. A cornerstone of the project is health tracking, so Aetna will subsidize the cost of a Watch for select customers and offer it free to its 50,000-strong workforce starting next year. Apple will also help Aetna develop new apps around medication reminders, billing (with Apple Wallet) and care management.

Aetna provided a clue as to how the Watch would be used by writing that its own employees "will participate in the company's wellness reimbursement program, to encourage them to live more productive, healthy lives." It could presumably also also collect detailed health and fitness data to help refine its actuarial tables and other insurance data, assuming user opt-in.

Apple also has a ResearchKit program that helps scientists relate heart-rate and other health data to cancer, heart disease and other maladies. It recently signed up the first major drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, which will use it for a rheumatoid arthritis study.

Apple has been working hard to getting its HealthKit app into the US health care system, so Tim Cook is understandably "thrilled" with the cozy relationship. An Aetna spokesperson told Ars Technica that "Apple will have employees devoted to providing support to Aetna on this initiative [and] ... will also have a dedicated employee unit focused on this collaboration." The Watch Series 2 may have convinced the insurer to get onboard, since it's more focused on health and fitness than the original model.