Who’s Tracking You? You!
Wearables have hit critical mass, with nearly half of consumers owning one. What leaders everywhere can learn from the boom.
First, she ordered a health-and-fitness tracker. Then she ordered wrist straps in different colors to match her outfits. Then she ordered undergarments specially fitted with a slot for the tracker, to keep it hidden at work events. Then she bought an app to integrate the data into an analytics program.
Not too long ago, wearables seemed like science fiction. Little devices that can track your sleep and blood sugar? Without going to a hospital for a sleep test or blood work? Today they’re fast becoming the norm: 46% of consumers own a wearable such as a smartwatch or smart ring, according to a survey by Rock Health, up from 13% in 2015. And these are not casual users: 83% wear them five days a week or more, continuously tracking everything from steps to heart rate. Consumers are increasingly sophisticated about their own health—suddenly aware, for example, that a serving of potato chips leads to high blood sugar, then tiredness. Users swear by wearables, but there’s a catch. “They’re not precise enough for clinical judgment,” says David Vied, global sector leader in the medical devices and diagnostics practice at Korn Ferry.
The boom is a lesson for leaders in all industries in how a trend can spark (or revive) a business that barely existed before. It’s also a lesson in risk: Consumers tend to be unaware of the difference between consumer wearables and FDA-regulated, medical-grade devices, which typically provides continuous monitoring. Consumer devices are considered wellness products, and usually monitor only intermittently, like the blood-sugar devices that gather information every 15 minutes. This has not stopped tech firms from developing them and (carefully) marketing them as capable of tracking medical events—a practice experts say could someday backfire. Companies are developing watches, phones, and devices to tell users whether they’re experiencing tachycardia or are at risk for an attack of rheumatoid arthritis. “They’re walking right up to the line of clinical relevance,” says Vied.
To be sure, the trend hasn’t happened overnight. Today, nearly twenty years after the launch of Fitbit, wearables are a mature business in an ecosystem full of accessories and integrations. Over the decades, the industry has swerved from fitness tracking to health monitoring. Most products, unable to garner consumer followings, have ultimately failed—making them a notoriously risky investment for developers, manufacturers, and retailers alike. “The question is always to what degree is a device a fad?” says Korn Ferry retail expert Craig Rowley. High-selling devices tend to log metrics that have recently become faddish: During the pandemic, it was blood-oxygen levels; more recently, it’s glucose monitoring for people without diabetes. Retailers struggle to identify whether consumers will always want to monitor a metric, or lose interest in a year. Devices are particularly prone to fad cycles because users must purchase and wear them to try them out. One typical pattern is heavy usage for a couple months, and then abandonment.
Only three in ten device users received their device from a clinician or insurance company, according to Rock Health data. Clinicians tend to mostly ignore patients’ devices, for the good reason that there’s liability in depending on a non-clinical-grade product—and because the data itself is just data without contextual information, such as medications, lifestyle, and family history. That’s why patients who walk into appointments with printouts of their recent data will see their doctor order tests from a trusted source.
The next frontier is smart homes, for which devices not only log data but trigger actions. For example, if someone in the household falls, neighbors are alerted and a smart lock on the front door will automatically open. Smart pillboxes dispense pills, remind users to take them, and send notifications if doses are missed. Rather than integrating a collection of separate gadgets, the consumer industry is moving toward an integrated health environment that provides continuous monitoring and, when needed, support. Ultimately, at least for general consumers, the monitoring will likely come from one device. “Eventually, there will be one wearable that does it all,” says Rowley.
Experts advise firms to focus on devices with immediately actionable outputs—or else face eternity in a drawer full of discarded wearables, says Rowley. “The wearables that succeed long-term really help people manage their lives in one way or another.”
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