Following the Deconstruction phase of our Fitbit Redesign Sprint, we set out to answer this question:
Could we build these physical devices and digital experiences ourselves as a startup?
With the assumption that we are start-up ordering 100,000 units, all of which are pre-sold and will be in-use simultaneously, we sought estimations regarding material sourcing, computational requirements, scaling our capabilities, protecting our intellectual property, and considering our carbon footprint.
This process forced our team to contend with ambiguities and assumptions in the design and engineering of consumer product ecosystems. What followed revealed that no product is entirely simple, safe, affordable, or without environmental impact, and finding out how we might design for such goals is an ongoing challenge.
Digital Experience Engineering
Recreating the digital experience for Fitbit or a similar product requires planning for front end development of app and website platforms, managing data storage and computing services, environmental impact, and cybersecurity.
Platform Development
There are several options in developing mobile and web applications, each with its own features and drawbacks. The categories our team defined are development tools that are coded, non-coded, and low coded, shown in the following table. For backend development Node.js, Xcode, Appcode, Java, and Kotlin are possible tools.
To publish our app to various app stores we documented the steps in the process.
Apple App Store:
- Sign up for the Apple Developer Program.
- Prepare your app for submission.
- Create your App Store listing via App Store Connect.
- Make your App Store screenshots.
- Upload your app to App Store connect using Xcode.
- Submit your app for review.
Google Playstore:
- Create a Google Developer account
- Add a Merchant Account
- Prepare the Documents
- Study Google Developer Policies
- Technical Requirements
- Creating the App on the Google Console
- Store Listing
- Content Rating
- Pricing the Application
- Upload APK and Send for Review
Managing the development process involves more than just finding the right tools. Investment in both time and money were considered assuming we have the minimally required resources available (Procoders).
Development time:
Design: 5–6 weeks
Front-end: 8- 10 weeks
Back-end: 12–15 weeks
Testing: 2–3 weeks
Total: 18–22 weeks
Total hours: 720- 880 working hours
Development cost:
Cost of developers, designers, and/or engineering leads: $50 — $150/hr
Number of Designers: 2–3
Cost of Project Lead: 1
Cost of Engineering Lead: 1
Developers: 5–6
Total: 11 people
Cost: $50/hr x 11 people x 720–880 hrs = $396,000 — $484,000
Infrastructure:
Cloud Infrastructure + Hosting Cost (AmazonS3, Amazon RDS, EC2) = $110/mo
App Hosting:
Apple app store: $99/yr
Google play store: $25 flat
Total for 1 year expenditure:
$484,000 (development) + $1320 (infrastructure) + $99 + $25 (app store fees) = ~$485,444
Managing Data Storage and Computing
Self tracking products require a robust infrastructure to collect, process, and store data. Database programs such as MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL are frequently used. For existing APIs, Google Heathcare API enables industry-specific and compliant data exchange. Cloud services are the primary platforms built atop for creating data infrastructure. Below is a summary of AWS application hosting services from Amazon’s site.
- Amazon S3 for data storage — Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It is durable, highly available, and secure. Amazon S3 also stores multiple redundant copies of your data.
- EC2 for hosting web application — Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You define your virtual Amazon EC2 environment with the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for your hosted application. Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage your compute resources.
- Amazon RDS — Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable database capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks.
- Amazon ELBs — For load distributions. The whole point of a load balancer is to distribute your traffic to multiple web-servers. The reason you want a load balancer is to: 1) Run multiple web-servers to ensure you don’t have a single point of failure; 2) Allow advanced routing rules; 3) Act as a choke point for traffic so we can add additional services to secure, filter or analyze traffic
In terms of scaling from 1,000 to 100,000 to 1,000,000 monthly users, information online (ClickIt, Startup School) suggests big servers are needed for thousands of monthly users, such as 1 xlarge instance for the database and 1 xlarge instance for the web server, costing roughly $300 — $700 per month. For less users, two medium instances are needed, costing about $60 — $80 per month. And lastly, for millions of users we approximated $9,000 — $21,000 per month based on the first estimate. As costs and capabilities shift it can be difficult to identify which infrastructure results in the best option, and that is where Terraform, an open-source infrastructure as code software tool, can be most useful.
Environmental Impact
Atmospheric carbon is inevitably created in computing and hosting digital applications. Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2, based on the usual U.S. electric mix (Stanford Magazine). For scale, Microsoft emitted about 16m tonnes of greenhouse gas in 2020, Google 1.5m tons, and Amazon 44m tons (Greenpeace, Financial Times).
Based on references we found 1 EC2 Instance running for 24hrs can result in 171.3 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated (gCO₂eq), 1 RDS Instance for 24 hrs results in 109 gCO₂eq.
Physical Device Manufacturing
The key factors to plan the device manufacturing include: material sourcing and procurement, managing operations, environmental impact, and upholding regulatory compliance.
Material Sourcing and Procurement
To determine what materials are needed to create a Fitbit means we must know where materials for electronic devices are sourced from. There is little information about Fitbit’s suppliers or manufacturing facilities available online with the exception of a couple student projects providing high level summaries (Design Life Cycle, Fitbit: How it’s Made) and articles from 2019 discussing Fitbit’s intent to manufacture out of China due to tariffs.
In lieu of direct information about Fitbit, much of our information came from iPhone material source articles (Vice, Business Insider) and Apple’s supplier list which is published annually.
Knowing that many components of an iPhone are similar to that of a Fitbit, we devised a list of critical components, companies that manufacture them, and where they can be sourced from.
Core Components, Processes, and Some Manufacturers:
- Lithium Ion Battery (TDK, Sunwoda)
- Aluminum (Alcoa, Chalco)
- Steel (China Baowu Steel Group, ArcelorMittal)
- LED/LCD Displays (LG, Panasonic)
- Glass (Corning, Biel)
- Plastic (Sabic)
- Sensors (ams, Robert Bosch, Rockley Photonics, Elenion)
- Semiconductors (TSMC, NXP, Qualcomm, AMD, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Infineon)
- Assembly (HonHai, Pegatron, Wistron, Jabil)
Countries of Origin:
- China
- Japan
- South Korea
- Taiwan
- India
- Vietnam
- Malaysia
- Philippines
- Singapore
- Austria
- Germany
- Finland
- Ireland
- Canada
- United States
In determining the price of each component, the information found online is likely different from contracts determined between companies. Nonetheless, the following includes references and estimates for sourcing components based on available information online.
OLED Display:
$5 — $25 per piece, OTS depending on size, resolution
$300–500 for custom OLED tooling =
Total $500k — $2.5mil
Printed Circuit Board (PCB):
~$7000 — $20k for 40x20mm² boards (~$0.05-$0.20 per board), ~$3000 for shipping (air), ~$1000 for shipping (sea) =
Total ~$10k — $25k (ship by air)
Lithium Ion Battery:
Li-Ion / Li-Poly Pouch: $0.90-$1.50 per piece, $1.5mil to ship =
Total ~$1.6-$2mil
Plastic Enclosure/Band:
Custom Injection molding: ~$3k-$5k for tooling, $0.10–0.25/part =
$15k-35k total
Based on our estimates, the longest item to procure would be the custom OLED display at 23–29 weeks (2–2.5yrs), whereas the li-ion battery would be roughly 6–12 weeks and the PCB 5–10 weeks.
Managing Operations
In addition to the components needed, managing the factory and supplier relationships is another critical factor. For a minimum of two engineers, supply chain managers, and operations managers per each activity (assembly line, test station and vendor, display, battery, PCB, enclosure, sensors or antennae, packaging, transportation and fulfillment, and building management), the result is a minimum of 30 people, and could be 60 people for a third team member per activity. In reality, many more stakeholders are required to manage manufacturing operations such as planners, sales associates, supply chain analysts, project managers, and assembly leads.
The tools to manage operations could be as simple as Excel spreadsheets, Kanban tables, and project management methods, or it could include sophisticated techniques such as blockchain traceability. For critical components, such as conflict minerals, companies must prove traceability which blockchain can provide. According to Apple’s 2021 Conflict Minerals Report, Blockchain is used to ensure the process is tracked and data privacy is ensured.
In protecting the intellectual property associated with and through manufacturing, non-disclosure agreements (NDA), supplier audits, database security, and the use of codenames for projects are needed depending on the risk.
Upholding Regulatory Compliance
Regulations for wearable devices focus on electronic safety, communications, personal health data privacy, toxins, and ethical sourcing of minerals. However, companies will perform additional reliability testing based on consumer use, such as Apple’s beer testing.
A list of these regulations and/or regulatory bodies are below:
- RoHS — Restriction of Hazardous Substances Regulations
- REACH — Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals for EU
- WEEE — Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
- FDA approval for any medical application
- FCC — Federal Communications Commission
- CE — European Conformity
- Germany Supply Chain Due Diligence Act
- UL Certification
- EMC — Electromagnetic Compatibility
- California Proposition 65
- TPCH — Toxics in Packaging Clearing House
- US Public Law 104–142 for batteries
- Dodd-Frank Act — Conflict Minerals Reporting
Following this phase, we began our Reconstruction of a wearable ecosystem to be featured in a new blog post.
