No one can argue that we haven’t seen an explosion of wearable devices in the healthcare space. In most cases, they’ve been a consumer purchase, but there are a few cases of them being used clinically. While we’ve seen a huge uptick in wearable use, there seems to be a massive disconnect between those who use them and those who need to use them.
This was highlighted to me recently when I heard someone say that at the recent Boston Marathon they predicted that almost every athlete running the Boston Marathon had some sort of tracking device on them to track their running. Runners love to track everything from steps to heart rate to speed and everything in between. I wish the Boston Marathon did a survey to know what devices the runners used. That would be a fascinating view into which wearables are most popular, but I digress.
When I heard this person make this observation, I quickly thought “That’s not who we need using wearables if we want to lower the cost of healthcare.”
With some exceptions, those who run the Boston Marathon are in incredible shape. They exercise a lot (maybe too much in some cases) and most of them eat quite healthy. These are the outliers and my guess is that they’re not the people that are costing our healthcare system so much money. That seems like a fair assumption to me.
Yes, the people we need using these wearables are those people sitting on the couch back at home. We need the unhealthy people tracking their health, not healthy people. While not always the case, unhealthy people don’t really want to track their health. What’s more demotivating to your healthy goals than being in a FitBit group with a marthon runner that always destroys you?
This is a challenging psychological problem that I haven’t seen any wearable company address. I guess there’s too much money to be made with healthy people that want to track themselves that they don’t need to dive into the psychological impact of wearables on unhealthy people. However, that’s exactly what we’re going to need to do as wearables become more clinically relevant and can help us better understand a patient’s health.