The Fitness Tracker Fallout

We’ve talked about this a bit before. Fitness trackers are all the rage, but they have yet to overcome the challenge of becoming an enduring product line.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised by this fallout. When I look at the graveyard of fitness products that my wife has purchased, they’ve all gone through a similar fallout. They get purchased, used briefly and then set to the side. It’s very much the nature of the fitness market.

Unfortunately, I have yet to see anything in the fitness market that will change this reality. The closest I get is the health sensors that are integrated directly into the cell phone. Our cell phones have GPS, accelerometors and other health related sensors built in. We’re really close to being able to track much of our health on our smartphone with no interaction from us as the end user. That will be a game changer.

Another example of this is some of the amazing ways that our health data can be calculated and tracked through our cell phone’s video camera. Imagine if much of our health data could be collected by taking a selfie a day. I can’t market a product that asks you to sit in front of a camera every day. I can market taking a selfie a day. We’re almost there.

Other wearables like smart clothing are interesting as well. Last I checked we all wore clothing regularly. There’s no change of habit required to wear smart clothing that monitors your health. This is going to be the key to avoiding the fall out.

What else do you see happening with health tracking? What will help us avoid the seemingly inevitable fall out?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Hey John, so funny, I am starting to think like you! bit.ly/WwTi6U I think we will see a migration from wearables you have to put on your wrist or clip on your clothes to embeddables, like MC10 flexible temporary tattoos – put them on and forget them – at least for a while. And then, maybe even implantables (under the skin doing their thing all the time. Pat

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