Fitbit – keeping (f)it simple
Interesting little device I saw today (that am not affiliated with), which sits on the cusp of mobile, healthcare / wellness and data-as-a-consumer-service trend, and does it as a combined device+service, rather than just an app: Fitbit. It has an inbuilt accelerometer to measure your steps, or your sleep patterns, and spits it out to a dedicated web service to track your progress.
The CPU, tech features and storage are no doubt fairly trivial - most smart phones wouldn't get out of bed for that (and a bunch already do similar things), but Fitbit are betting on simplicity. This removes many of the intimidating tech obstacles that put most people off ever trying to push their mobile limits - downloading apps, navigating a UI and syncing with a computer / web service.
Single use devices win on simplicity, but have a big downside: they make up for the lack of redundancy at the software level with wasted packaging. I hope they minimize this, making the charger compatible with other home electronics for example. More electronics enviro-waste is a big turn off for these gadgets.
Waste aside, these focused devices are here to stay. I don't see Nokia's decision to go for free navigation as necessarily being the end for TomTom and Garmin, or that the iPad will necessarily blitz Kindle. Single use devices (can) do one thing very well, rather than lots of things passably. If enough people care about that difference, both the focused device and the swiss army knives will continue to co-exist.
Health2.0 meetup: Handhold Adaptive & Healogic
Went along last night to the well attended Health2.0 meetup, organized by Eugene Borukhovich. A capacity crowd - I thought there might be a danger of overcrowding and asphyxiation but relaxed when I remembered about 95% of the people in the room were MDs.
Two impressive presentations which go to show why mHealth is such an interesting space. The first was by Rick(?) Tedescu from Handhold Adaptive. It's a technology company making solutions for people who are, as their tagline reads, "differently enabled". Powerful story of a guy being motivated to create a solution to improve the life of his family and his son, Evan - who has autism. Their first product, iPrompts provides visual icons on the iPhone linked to words to make it easier for developmentally challenged people to interact. They're selling this on the App Store for $50. Lots of development plans there. My concern was whether the Apple rights management system was secure enough to prevent piracy of such a high value app.
Second up was a very smooth - apart from the technical glitches - presentation by Healogica, who make it easy for people with illnesses to find and register for relevant clinical trials. The founders Jean Luc and Jeff are MDs who have come fresh from heading the healthcare practice at Gerson Lehrman, and have raised 750k in angel funding in April this year, having self funded it for a year. Very polished performance and technology that seems to solve an identifiable problem for a certain group of people (the size of which is obviously the key question). They have an iPhone app whose revenues will be 100% given to research Pancreatic cancer research (Steve Jobs' disease, a savvy but well meant marketing touch).
Looking forward to more of these events, congrats Eugene.
Mayo Clinic going mobile
I've not been in the US long, but one name that I have consistently come across with regard to top of the line health care is the Mayo Clinic. They featured strongly in the recent Time cover story about the health care crisis - a rare US medical institution that saves money and gets results. My takeaway from the article was that it gets results because it saves money, focusing on a results -based approach rather than a process-based one (get paid for every procedure, whether or not it's actually helping).
So, happy to read this piece about Mayo in Mobihealthnews about their move to mobile. Their director of product management Scott Eising talks knowledgeably about the space, noting the platform fragmentation and the need for providers to make simple and relevant services that customers haven't even thought of yet (but will want them when their friends have them).
As I see it, mobile health will emerge as the result of a pincer movement, with customers getting increasingly engaged and familiar with living their life online with contextually smart mobile applications becoming ever more important, combined with irresistible pressure from healthcare providers and goverments to find efficiencies in the system that do not kill people. This is probably best done by shifting some people away from the expense and long waits of the doctor's office and towards more "lightweight" solutions - nurses rather than doctors and automatic, algorithmic based assessments that cheaply extend medical cover to more people and shift our system to a proactive, preventative approach.