5 Reasons Why the First Generation of Wearables has Failed
As Fitbit sales slump and the saturated market of fitness wearables becomes dominated by smartwatches, it looks like the dream is over for consumer fitness wearables. Why? Because they were solving the wrong problem.
Fitbit is in trouble. Current projections for Fitbit’s 2017 revenue come it at $1.6 billion[1] , a downturn of $1 billion compared to their 2016 sales of $2.6 billion[2]. Despite having a 23% market share of the wearables space[3], Fitbit had to lay off 6% of its workforce earlier this year[4]. Competitors have arisen in the form of Xiaomi, Garmin, and Samsung, but a clear trend of smartwatches stealing this market is evident[5]. Sales look set to continue in the fitness wearables space, albeit at a much slower pace than before. So, what has gone wrong with the first generation of wearables? It’s not just the human nature of attraction to fads and the inevitable boredom that follows. The failure of the first generation of wearables may be traced to 5 things: the industry wasting the potential of their technology on shallow problems, an ineffective use of the data gathered, issues surrounding data privacy, a lack of trust, and a lack of behavioural change from their use.
1. Consumer applications are a waste of wearables’ potential
This is the main reason why the first generation of wearables has failed. On the spectrum of world issues, they’re just not dealing with substantive problems. B to B uses and healthcare are the sectors that wearables should be focusing on, where there are the largest gains to be had. To give some context, here are some non-consumer applications of wearables:
-Epilepsy management
-The tracking of vulnerable elderly dementia sufferers by concerned family members
-HAZMAT use
-Predictive fatigue control for long-distance drivers to slash roadside fatalities
-Toxic fume reporting in polluted cities
-Accident reporting for cyclists and motorcyclists, linking them to the emergency services the second a crash takes place
-Stroke detection and prevention
-Anti-sepsis monitoring for surgical patients
In contrast, what we’ve been given are wristbands which make us feel bad about our sporadic gym attendance. This is simply not good enough. The invention of wearables has created an entirely new scientific field of biometric analysis which wasn’t possible 10 years ago, so why have we been left with fitness gadgets?
The answer lies in a simple analysis of effort/benefit ratio within the field of wearables. Consumer goods are a lot easier to get to market than goods which require high levels of regulation such as CE and FDA approval, which take years of R & D to develop. This allows a business to have a high initial windfall of revenue, but an inevitable petering out of profit once the consumer trend they’re catering to has finished running its course. Aside from the sheer effort of engineering required to create a product which is capable of addressing a complex problem, other stakeholders need to be involved in order for the solution to be a success. For instance, in order for the aforementioned use case of predictive fatigue control for long-distance drivers to be implemented, there would have to be serious changes in government legislation about safety requirements on the road, as well as an overhaul of public awareness about the issue. In short, there isn’t a willingness to tackle the really tough problems out there.
2. Lack of trust
The first generation of wearables has opted for an immediate windfall of profit, but at the cost of trustworthiness. Recent comparisons between various wearables for tracking physical activity showed large variations in accuracy between different devices, with error margins of up to 25%[6] [7]. This is because they do not have FDA or CE approvals which require more rigorous development processes, nor any desire to go through the cost or effort of gaining these. Without these approvals, they cannot be used for medical or research purposes. This wouldn’t be such a problem if consumers didn’t use these wearables for self-medicating purposes[8], which the equipment is inherently unfit for.
Added to the issue of untrustworthiness is the unwillingness of consumer wearable companies to address users’ concerns about the safety of their devices in casual day to day use. There are recurring concerns about the impact of electromagnetic radiation on users[9]. Anecdotal evidence seems to support that a small number of users may be hyper-sensitive to wearables[10]. However, this in itself is not a problem for wearables as a whole. The problem comes from the confusion that arises in users when this issue is not addressed head-on by consumer wearables companies. All that would take to resolve this problem would be a few trials into the hypersensitivity of users, with the result of ‘Warning: some users may experience mild pain from the use of this product. Please test for 1 week to establish sensitivity and stop use if pain continues’ on the back of packaging. This would be no different from nut allergy warnings which have now become the norm on foodstuffs.
3. I’ve got the data- now what?
Raw data is not the same as an end-to-end solution. Providing a user with data is only a part of any decision-making process. It seems that neither company nor user knows what the bio-metric data produced should actually be used for. It’s great that you know what your average heart rate is, but what are you actually going to do with that information? It’s not being displayed within the context of solving a problem where knowing your average heart rate would be a crucial metric. It’s just plonked on your smartphone on a cool-looking user interface to provide the illusion of productivity. What this produces in reality is a facsimile of a solution which has no problem to solve.
In addition to the fundamental problem of directionless data, even if there was a well-defined issue to solve, the quality of data provided by consumer wearables is not sophisticated enough to make progress towards a solution[11]. The feedback systems being utilised are based on reductive statistics, such as average weekly heart rate and general level of activity. Until individualised, sophisticated data sets are provided to users within an intelligent sense-making system, the actual problems that users can solve with wearables are going to be next to nothing.
4. Concerns about data privacy
Given that there are almost no laws which prevent the selling of data to 3rd parties, consumers’ concerns about the privacy of their data are absolutely justified. Of course, wearables companies may say that they’re not selling data onto other companies, but there is no real way to prove this due to a lack of legal infrastructures to tackle this very real, and very serious problem. Over the last few years we have experienced a medley of scandals about data privacy breaches, from Windows 10 secretly sharing personal information with Microsoft[12], to Whatsapp sharing conversations with parent company Facebook without engaged user consent[13], and, of course, Fitbit and Jawbone (RIP) openly sharing or selling user data to 3rd parties[14] [15].
Although this is an industry-wide problem in the technology sector, the implications of wearables sharing biometric data with 3rd parties are far more catastrophic than your sexts being reviewed by the U.S.A’s Internal Revenue Service, as revealed by the 2013 Wikileaks scandal.
This is because the 3rd party sales process can cause a snowball effect. Let’s say that HealthBands Inc decides to sell your non-anonymised biometric data to BigInsurance Plt. BigInsurance Plt decides to use this data to change their insurance tariffs. Great news if you’re super fit and healthy, bad news if you have a high likelihood of acquiring a lifestyle-related disease- you’re now ineligible for health insurance. BigInsurance Plt now decides to sell this data on to MegaCorp Inc who’s interested in doing a major background check on their current cohort of sales applicants. With this new large data set, not only are they able to match some of their applicants to their original biometric data record, they also establish that a few of their applicants have a background of depression[16]. MegaCorp Inc deems these applicants too high risk to hire, and immediately rejects their job applications without giving a reason why.
Over on the other side of town, Johnny-No-Good decides to buy a bulk of data from a few different sources: insurance companies, big data analytics companies, supermarkets, and porn sites. He can now correlate all of these different data sets in order to identify you more thoroughly- going so far as to put phone number to name, and name to bank account details. He then sells this information over the Darknet to identity thieves for a neat sum of cash.
And just like that- your consumer wearable device has caused you to not afford treatment for a serious illness, be deemed unfit for employment, and become a victim to identity theft. This may seem far-fetched right now, but without proper laws in place to either regulate or prevent the selling of data to 3rd parties, this is the future that we are all facing.
This future is already starting: there are an array of health apps which base their entire business model around the unauthorised selling of their user’s data to insurance companies. Most notable recently is EpicHealth — a British med-tech company who brandishes this source of revenue with pride to investors whilst hiding behind a smokescreen of good publicity. Companies like these are directly causing a deterioration of living standards for everyone, and they will not stop unless governments step in and force them to stop.
5. Consumer wearables only track behaviour, they don’t change it
Over half of all Fitbit buyers stop using them within the year, with one third of them stopping use within the first six months[17] . A recurring theme with the first generation of consumer wearables is that the results don’t meet user expectations. The mistake here has been to confuse the tool with the skill required to use it. A recent excellent example of this is the implementation of Hitachi automated vehicles in Australian mine sites.
The expectation when Hitachi started implementing their automated vehicles in different mine sites was that there would be tangible, unified results across the sites. It makes sense to assume this; there is absolutely no difference between any of the vehicles nor their base settings, so why wouldn’t you see blanket improvements in productivity? The results were surprising to everyone involved. Every mine site reported completely different results. The slight differences in site layout or mineral being mined couldn’t have been enough to push the results to these extremes, especially with industry-standard operational standards in effect. So what was the differential factor? It was the humans. A new technology isn’t enough to solve a problem, a business culture change has to take place in order for it to work. The same applies on a personal scale.
What the first generation of consumer wearables hasn’t realised is that they are not technology companies. They are actually personal fitness businesses who have wound up selling technology gadgets in lieu of actual health improvement systems. So is it any wonder that users are disappointed?
Alex Moss is CEO & Head Designer of Canaria: a NASA-endorsed technology company developing medical-grade wearables for use in the resources sector to prevent catastrophic events.
[3] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41996116
[5] https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/09/01/smartwatches-overtake-fitness-trackers.aspx
[6] Lee JM, Kim Y, Welk GJ. Validity of consumer-based physical activity monitors. Medicine and science in sports and exercise. 2014;46(9):1840–8. doi: 10.1249/MSS.0000000000000287 [PubMed]
[7] Case MA; Burwick HA; Volpp KG; Patel M. Accuracy of Smartphone Applications and Wearable Devices for Tracking Physical Activity Data. JAMA. 2015;313(6):10–11. [PubMed]
[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4737495/
[9] https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Surge/Fitbit-and-electromagnetic-radiation/td-p/1412524
[10] https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/exercise/2639550-Are-fitbits-safe-for-constant-use
[11] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2089651
[14] Fitbit’s Ts & Cs: https://www.fitbit.com/eu/legal/privacy this is nicely summed up by Kelsey Munro in her Sydney Morning Herald article, ‘Data collection: Wearable fitness device information tracking your life’, “Fitbit’s policy says it will sell your data with your name removed “to interested audiences” and notes that the US, where all Fitbit data is held, may not have the same privacy protections as your own country”
[15] Jawbone’s Ts & Cs: https://jawbone.com/legal/terms Jawbone will “share” de-identified data with 3rd parties
[16] They have reached this assumption, which itself may or may not be correct, by noticing patterns of inactivity in these applicants’ biometric data sets.
[17] http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2089651
