Consumers Like Medical Toys Too

The following is an expansion of an article by MedGadget Editor Sean Duffy, originally written for the April 2010 Frost and Sullivan Medical Devices eBulletin
A new segment of medical technology has been born and its infantile life is being coddled and shaped — not by incumbents in the world of healthcare technology — but largely by entrepreneurs. They’re creating products to fill a void not possible with yesterday’s technology, a space previously untapped, and the early results are in: consumers are ripping open their wallets to take advantage of the benefits these products provide. The big players in the medical technology world would be smart to take notice, both for their own benefit and the benefit of consumer health.
What forms this new landscape of healthcare technology? Products that are a hybrid of medical and consumer devices, designed to provide consumers ways to actively track and shape their health. Because most are passive technologies, and not “formally” considered medical products, they avoid the scrutiny of the FDA and the requirement to find insurance reimbursement before product development. Hyperspeed innovation will be possible in these markets and the next few years is likely to see an influx of new turns and twists of the same idea.
Let’s start with the Zeo, a device that tracks your sleeping patterns (slow wave, REM, duration, etc) and can even wake you up outside of REM sleep, when you’re mostly likely to feel refreshed. Until now, any accurate data on someone’s sleep patterns involved a formalized, expensive sleep study.
Zeo capitalized on the idea that sleep monitoring using Electroencephalography (EEC) technology can be done more simply and that consumers would value the information. The company originally entered the market by highlighting the smart alarm feature of the device but quickly shifted under user demand to focus primarily on the device’s ability to track sleep patterns through the night. Zeo users are treated to easy-to-understand graphs that allow them to take an active stance on tweaking their own sleep behavior. For an extra $100 to the purchase price of the device, the user even gets an unlimited subscription to sleep coaching.
The Zeo headband that slurps the data from the user’s brain is comfortable and non-intrusive. The clock itself is good-looking, their website is attractive, and their marketing is snappy and smart. At $249, you might think consumers wouldn’t even sleep on the idea of buying the device. But they’re not… orders have been piling in and the press has taken note.
Another player that has their product flying off the shelves is Fitbit, a pedometer on steroids that allows you to monitor how active your daily habits are, how many calories you’re burning, and if you toss and turn in your sleep, all on a simple and attractive web interface. The data collected from the Fitbit is automatically and wirelessly synced with your computer, allowing you to never think about the device besides when it needs to be charged, a fantastically infrequent once every ten or so days. In one swoop, the Fitbit rethought the pedometer, taking the device from a simple step-counter with one readout, to a detailed accelerometer collecting a flood of data allowing a more precise glimpse into your daily activity. You’d think that a $99 pedometer might not sell well, but the current one month wait to get your hands on one says otherwise.
Philips is one of the few big-boys who is dipping its toes into this market with their product, similar to the Fitbit, called DirectLife. Philips sells DirectLife as an accessory to a subscription service where you pay monthly for a life-activity-coach that helps you look at your data. The form factor of device itself is not as slick as the Fitbit (though it’s arguably better for those who want to wear the device as a necklace), and it requires you to plug it into your usb port on your computer to download the data. Philips is putting significant effort into marketing the device to various companies as an employee health benefit and, from what I can tell, its been a successful product.
Then there’s the Withings wifi scale that automatically uploads your weight and fat composition so you can access it either through an online web application or via the device’s very own iPhone application. This sort of precise tracking allows the consumers to monitor their progress and set goals over time. Again, at $159, this is a high-end scale, yet the demand is there and it’s gotten significant attention, once again showing that personal data tracking is useful and consumers want an easy way to monitor their health and habits. Now they’ve even got competition. Say hello to BodyTrace.
This new category of consumer medical products is poised to grow quickly. So what’s next? Where might entrepreneurs and foreword thinking incumbents that have the money to develop these technologies go from here?
The first train that hasn’t quite left the station is using the data productively for behavior modification. The coaching that DirectLife and Zeo have embraced is a start, but to really have the information given to consumers from these devices used as effectively as possible is another animal. These companies need to think about fundamental human motivation and take tips from the recent surge in excessively addictive social games like Zynga’s FarmVille. Companies should try to get consumers addicted to being healthy.
To do so, the data that’s placed online from these devices shouldn’t be siloed to only the user. It should allow for anonymous sharing and aggregation, allowing users to see where they fall on, say, a graph of weight distribution of people with similar demographics as their own. People like to compare themselves to others, and knowing where you lie amongst the world would be a boon for making these tools addictive and improving health effectively. Consider Withing’s Wifi scale for a moment. Say you could set a weight goal and then the system would anonymously find other users with the same base weight and same goal and you’d be able to see how you’re doing in relation to others trying the same thing. The system might incorporate badges for doing a job well done and achieving certain milestones. It might unlock certain site features if you’ve completed certain milestones or provide other rewards, like a discount for a membership to eHarmony.com or maybe a gift certificate to WholeFoods. Maybe the site could integrate with a site like StickK that allows you to bet real money against a goal, that goes directly to the charity or friend of your choice if you don’t achieve it. Since a scale doesn’t lie, you’d be hard pressed to get out of these obligations.
And those are only ideas for weight loss. Clearly, there’s vast potential in using this data to benefit the health of the consumer. These devices should work their way into people’s lives to allow them to better manage their health. A small, consumer marketed sticker that monitors and uploads your heart rate would be a boon to both patients and doctors who want accurate trends of physiological measures. Blood pressure cuffs should share their data wirelessly as well, allowing the user to see where they’ve trended over time. And why stop there? How about innovating on existing glucose monitors (already being done to some extent) or a pin prick cholesterol panels? Or what’s preventing a device like the FitBit from helping monitor my grandma who still wants to live at home but is prone to falling – any abrupt movements that might indicate a slip or stumble would surely be detectable with today’s sensitive accelerometers.
These are no doubt exciting times in the new world of consumer medical devices. And lastly, with this excitement, let’s quickly take a step back and think about something that might slow the whole thing down: data interoperability. Any company that’s thinking of making a device in this class should also think about how it might someday interact with other devices in this class. Scales that track weight, for example, should store this data in a similar format and allow for it’s import or export. It would be a shame if users of multiple technologies suddenly found themselves needing to go to Zeo for their sleep data, Fitbit for their movement data, and Withings for their weight data.
The ecosystem of these technologies would be better served if the information was let free using data standards and APIs that allowed developers access to the information (with the consumer’s explicit permission, of course). This would allow game developers, for example, to suck in this data to encourage personal behavior changes. Companies could be formed to create personal health interfaces that would compete with each other and attract users by providing the most value with the data. Device manufacturers should embrace the effect of open standards, focus on making money of the devices themselves, and allow consumers to pool their health data.
Accurate, simply tracked health data is powerful and is headed to the consumer. A wise corporate eye would be foolish to dismiss the potential of these innovations.