Wearable Tech Could Be Your Path to Making Millions

If up-and-coming technology entrepreneurs want to be successful, they will need to start moving away from computers and phones, and start focusing on the human body.

We’ve been measuring ourselves since the dawn of time. Even your driver’s license lists basic observable characteristics, such as height and weight. As technology has progressed, we’re seeing more and more advanced and illuminating quantifications of things like our blood pressure, IQ, and fertility, just to name a few. Scientists and statisticians have been able to make more sense of human beings, both on a macro and micro scale, as more quantifiable data becomes available. Certainly, we’re better off because of it, considering all the medical advances we’ve seen in the past few decades.

But that’s the issue we face now. Scientists and statisticians have been the ones making sense of all this data, translating it to the general public in the form of trends and averages. If you wanted to learn about your own body specifically, you would still need professional help, using expensive technologies like MRIs and CT scans at hospitals. The biggest issue with this is that you wouldn’t even require one of those tests unless there was already something wrong with you. In short, trying to understand your body and its functions has been an expensive, complicated, and tedious process.

That’s beginning to change now. Within the past decade or so, we’ve developed technologies that are telling us more about ourselves as individuals, at a fraction of the cost of a visit to the doctor. The top of mind item in this field is the Fitbit, though there are many other products that have similar capabilities. Suddenly, we can track every movement we make, and be prompted to make changes to our daily routines in order to optimize our physical capabilities. Additionally, these products are able to track our sleep patterns, which we inherently can’t do (because we’re sleeping). Sleep is one of the most crucial aspects of a healthy lifestyle, and we are only now beginning to understand our own sleep habits and tendencies. Sleep studies have been available as a medical service, but again, it’s something meant for people who are already experiencing significant issues. Fitbits and their competitors aim at preventing these issues before they even begin.

Via TechCrunch.com

This growing self-tracking culture has been dubbed the “Quantified Self” (QS) (Hyperlink) movement. One of its biggest proponents is Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and a highly esteemed futurist, who has written several books on technology and its development in our culture. In fact, in his most recent book, The Inevitable, “Tracking” is one of the 12 technological forces that shape our future. The general idea of QS can be summed up in a semi-mathematical tagline:

N-of-1

QS co-founder Gary Wolf describes the idea in a compelling way:

Scientific progress in medicine and public health during the last century has been dominated by studies performed with groups of people. Today many people collect data their own data to help investigate a health problem, make progress towards a goal, or simply because we are curious. Such investigations need not be conducted on groups. Often, they involve just a single person who is both the subject and the investigator. They are “N-of-1” trials, where data are generated by the individual, normally making use of self-quantification systems, including mobile apps and portable monitoring devices.

So essentially, these new technologies are allowing us to experiment on ourselves, in order to see what might improve our health and wellbeing. Aspiring tech entrepreneurs should take note, because this seems like an industry that is just starting to catch fire. Forbes (hyperlink) references a market analysis from CCS Insight that claims the wearable technology market will be worth around $34 billion by 2020, with 411 million devices being sold in that year alone. That’s compared to the $14 billion market and 60 million sold units expected for 2016. That’s an exploding opportunity, and anyone who has a technology background and dreams of starting a company would be wise to seriously consider jumping into the wearable industry.

Via Forbes.com

Now, being able to track the steps you’ve taken, the calories you’ve burned, and how well you’ve slept are all valuable things to know. But, emerging technologies are even more groundbreaking and potentially lifesaving.

Bellabeat (hyperlink) is a particularly interesting new company. Their products, which are exclusively aimed at women, go beyond typical fitness measurements. Their Leaf product line has features such as tracking one’s menstrual cycle, guided meditation, and motivational feedback, all in addition to the typical data collected by wearable tech. Period tracking in particular, is extremely cutting edge and innovative, and can be a crucial piece of knowledge in terms of analyzing one’s own reproductive health.

Via Bellabeat.com

If a budding entrepreneur really wants to make a big splash in the wearable market, spurring action in users is a crucial piece of the puzzle that hasn’t been solved yet. A University of Pittsburgh study (Hyperlink) showed that in two groups of Weight Watchers members, those armed with fitness trackers actually lost weight less successfully than those who were just given advice on eating healthy and exercising regularly. There are a multitude of potential causes of this, the most interesting being that succeeding in the daily goals set by a fitness tracking device led participants to feel they could continue eating poorly. One potential solution could be to create a wearable device that measures consumption and caloric intake. This seems like a difficult thing to make, but considering what we’ve created in the past decade or so, this technology is probably within reach.

Another issue that comes with self-tracking is the idea of “analysis paralysis,” which is to say, as Profusion CEO Mike Weston discusses, “Wearers can be unsure about what to do with the information they’ve collected. This is another reason why some people do not get on with tracking in the long term.” Clearly, this is big opportunity for new entrepreneurs to make a name for themselves if that can solve this crucial problem in the wearable market.

In all, the wearable technology industry is on pace to become one of the most important and diverse technology markets. We’ve already seen technology that is fundamentally changing how we can understand our own bodies. That being said, it’s certainly not a perfect industry yet, and there is plenty of opportunity for new technologies to come along and impact our lives in new and more profound ways. The real goldmine for potential entrepreneurs is to figure out how to create actual changes in human behavior based on the feedback wearables can provide. So if you’ve been interested in startups and technology, there may be no better way to impact people’s well-being than by helping them avoid future health crises. Watch this space!

This article was originally published at biotechblog.com