Tracking Health Trackers

The Quantified Self movement has the data to prove it is effective, and it's here to stay. Major institutions are integrating data acquisition into how they approach the coming changes in health care. Whether you're tackling corporate weight loss like Retrofit does, or developing treatments for chronic medical conditions as our clients' customers are, driving end-user behavior change is the most effective way to affect long-term lifestyle improvements. Collecting sensor data, analyzing it, providing analysis directly to the user in an easy-to-digest and actionable way, and augmenting this with feedback and reinforcement from specialists is a really powerful way to change behavior and influence outcomes. That same type of approach can be applied in treating chronic medical conditions, and provides unexpected inspiration to our looming healthcare crisis.

As President of a software development company for large medical device and diagnostic firms, I personally find the technology incredibly sticky, but I decided to try a health tracker anyway. I purchased a Fitbit 8 months ago, and it's been driving some major changes. Chasing my young daughters is now even more delightfully rewarding. I've been having some extremely healthy coopetition with my wife. She outsteps me nearly daily, and I find myself pushing very hard to "win". She's an anesthesiologist, which gives her an incredible, natural edge in the daily stats. Between pre-op, OR and epidurals, she spends hours on her feet to easily make the 10K step goal. As an IT professional, I have to make a dedicated effort to come close to challenging the numbers she posts. Having one-on-one meetings as walks around the block helps a lot, as do conferences. Both the HIMSS conference and SXSW were great data days for me. I averaged 15K steps a day at HIMSS, while SXSW delivered a solid 18K. In the past I might have complained about the distance; instead I was happy to check out that vendor at the very last booth or the venue across town.

From a corporate perspective, we help medical device and diagnostics companies cope with the coming health care changes, and we see the ever-increasing spread of wearable sensors as a major opportunity for our customers to create more value. This is particularly true for the management of an aging population, even with medical conditions for which track and data sharing adoption may be slowed given more sensitivity about blood glucose levels or other medical markers. The benefits of sharing are likely to overcome such concerns. Providing the right level of privacy and socialization will be key as our population ages. Lightweight, wireless enabled sensor networks connected via smartphones to cloud- and server- based storage and applications make it feasible to monitor physiological measures continuously, which allows older adults and individuals with chronic conditions to remain in the home environment while they are remotely monitored for safety. Data from continuous, real-time monitoring can be analyzed to provide early detection or in some cases predict changes in health status. This approach is being applied across a wide variety of conditions: including heart disease, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, stroke, dementia, and cancer.

Continuous monitoring using wearable sensors can not only help with early detection and diagnosis, but also enable more effective home-based therapy and provide better measurement of treatment effectiveness. Using sensor data to provide actionable and motivational feedback to patients and augmenting that with reinforcement from specialists can serve as a multiplier to the effectiveness of treatments. Medical device and diagnostic firms that can harness this approach will significantly increase the value they create in the new healthcare environment.

The jump in adoption is pretty astounding. As you see in our infographic below, 69% of all U.S. adults track health indicators, 21% of them use tech devices to track, and just over half of the total tracking population shares that information with their clinician. The patients are driving the demand for tracking. As pressure on providers to improve outcomes and reduce costs for treating chronic conditions increases, more and more will embrace tracking to help them achieve results.

What does that rapid, prolific spread of tracking mean for us as individuals? People will push the boundaries of development and demand waterproof devices, haptic feedback, and nutrition intake that is passive and even easier because we want it all to count. While privacy concerns may prevent some would-be trackers from adopting advanced technology, our collective need for play value, the high utility of tools, and our competitive nature will all heighten the spread of these weight loss tools and the data they generate.

What does that mean for our companies and corporate weight loss? Welltech will only expand. Corporate wellness, specifically programs targeted to employee weight loss and managing expensive, chronic conditions, will grow to meet the increasing demand to lower health care costs. I don't think of the Fitbit as a weight loss tool, but the availability of the data and social accountability to your weight loss team or advisor in the Retrofit model makes sense to me. That data and the positive pressure of coopetition are key factors in shifting my personal behavior towards a healthier lifestyle. The opportunity is huge for high-tech weight loss and the wide range of measurement devices that help us better manage our biological processes and influence total health and quality of life.