Fitness trackers 20 years from now

The question that started it all: 20 years from now, if Fitbit goes bankrupt for some reason, am I left in the wind?

At least in health space, I see the value of the data being strongly related to how many data points you have available to answer questions against it. The more you track, the better conclusions you can derive.

A common use-case would be tracking your weight in the morning: if you weight yourself once a week, that's not too bad. Looking back over a year, you can see 56 points of data and derive conclusions at a week and month level. You can then start relating it to events and periods in time. Do that for 2 years and you can start trying to create hypotheses about your weight fluctuation and correlate that with your habits. But you can only "zoom" so far as a one week, and only have one point reference when you zoom out - last year.

Weight yourself every day for 5 years, and you data can reveal more things. "How much weight do I usually gain after Christmas?" can be answered with an average of 5 data points, and if you zoom in even more, questions such as "How many days do I usually need, when I get back on track, to eliminate the extra water retention after holidays?"

The answers to the questions above don't usually come just as a result of a scale weight, but you get it. The more data we have, the better questions we can ask.

Hence why this whole Fitbit / Apple question bugged me. I'm investing time right now in getting data back, and actioning on that data. But, in a scenario where I lose access to this data, I also say goodbye to the compound benefits of storing that data about myself.

Let's pick another example: blood pressure monitoring. I could get daily values and act accordingly. But if, let's say, I loose 3 years of data because I switch my fitness tracking provider, I couldn't ask questions regarding any trends. The answer "For the last 3 years, my blood pressure has been going in an upwards trajectory." couldn't be derived from a blank slate.

What if I'm not happy with the advice Fitbit gives me and I want to move into Apple? What if I want to give my data to an awesome data-driven doctor to run an analysis over it?

A problem with preventative healthcare: if it isn't easy and almost ubiquitous, it's hard to incentivise people to do. In other words, you don't have enough fire burning under your ass to care about it. So things like raw CSV exports and SQL queries are left for the minority of the early adopters.

I'm now turning towards health trackers. A good framework for understanding why people make certain decisions was to look it through the lens of incentives.

If a company has something to gain of providing you with the best possible health care solution and has your long-term interest at heart, then it wants you to have the freedom to choose.

However, we're stepping into monetisation territory. A company is not always a charity, and people are not that eager to pay for problems they "might" have into the future. Again, no fire under your ass.

However, in the scenario of health-company-for-profit-not-subsidised-need-money, with users and data you can:

• Make user retention easier, using data moats to raise the switching costs and therefore, needing to keep less in check with our competitors
• Monetise with better targeted product placements / advertisements based sorting the user base via demographics
• Give access to aggregated data to other companies that find direct value in it

I can do all of those, without much permission. Or I can say "the faith of my company lies in the hands of people that are motivated enough about their health to support my initiatives financially". I know what odds I would take on that.

Monopoly also comes into play. Consumer electronics is a pricey field to play in.

As a user, when you pick one of these apps, you're not only saying "I like that you make your watches sleek and the animations for the achievements when I do 10k steps are pretty cool.", you are also silently saying "I decide to trust that you are going to make the right decisions not only today, but also for the foreseeable future, with both your product and my data."

But the big companies are carrying multiple battles:

• Maintaining current customer and revenue base to keep the lights on (current employees, production costs)
• Trying to predict who is going to f*ck them over (R&D, new product market fit initiatives)
• Trying to predict what is going to f*ck them over (sudden changes in the barriers to entry: see Monzo and dinosaur banks)

I love the big companies and some of the awesome stuff they are doing. But what the short history of tech has told us so far is that even the biggest players can get sucker punched.

In the game of health tracking and your data, a company shutting down turns consumers into collateral damage.

I'm trying to imagine a future, 30-50 years from now and figure out if health tracking can be anything but decentralised from any one company and fully in the control of the person that owns it while actually reaching the full potential of the technology. Imagine this but across all the possible metrics you can track. How long are people willing to justify the "it has some nice animations when it tracks my steps" as an important innovation? What about the "It warned me that I'm at risk of a stroke"?

How would that even work, in a decentralised manner? Let's say that, as a person, I own a "thing" that contains all my past tracked data. I can take this thing, and choose to select a service provider that helps me make sense of this data through an experience that I enjoy. If, over time, I decide that I want my data to be analysed by some other experts, I can take my now updated file and leave, unharmed.  

The big "no" that I would argue as the defense lawyer for the BigCo is that opening data and making it modular removes the 'switching cost' advantage that so many companies have. "Yes, sucks that you loose the data, but as a company it's quite possible that you stick with us cause you just invested too much already." (more about switching costs)

If someone ships whatever the 2050 version of the iPhone original launch had in 2007, the new ways of interacting with this device would require just porting my health file over and pick it up from where we left.

The answer is not obvious. Maybe I'm describing a data storage standard that the big companies share. Maybe I'm talking about a decentralised health tracker that plays in the consumer space.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3dgcPT5