Apple Watch and Other Apple News

Yesterday you probably heard that Apple came out with the new iPhone 6, Apple Pay, and the new Apple Watch. The iPhone 6 wasn’t terribly exciting. They have some new form factors that are similar to what Samsung’s been doing with the Android and will be a pain for developers who have to deal with multiple form factors. The iPhone 6 also has a bunch more storage.

Apple Pay is an interesting announcement since it has the chance to really change the way we pay for things. I’m still torn on how retailers and consumers will adopt the technology, but it’s a big bet and could really revolutionize the way we buy things. Our phone literally could become our credit card like many have envisioned for a long time. Of course, the recent iCloud leaked celebrity nude photos was bad timing for the announcement that Apple wants you to use your iPhone as your credit card. In reality, they are two very different security issues, but for the consumer that will get lost in the discussion.

The bigger news from a health standpoint is the Apple Watch (they chose not to go with the iWatch name). As you’d expect from Apple, the design is beautiful and well thought out. They’ve added a scroll wheel on the side to do things like zoom and also can be pressed to go to the home screen. Hard to say how functional this feature really will be until we get a chance to try it.

The Apple Watch does have some health features, but it basically feels like a Fitbit, Fuelband (discontinuted), or Jawbone on your arm. It does have a heart rate sensor and accelerometor. I thought they’d probably announce more health features. So, that was a disappointment. Maybe they are working on other health features, but they didn’t announce them. The Apple Watch doesn’t come out until early 2015 and will have a $349 price point.

I expect that many will buy the Apple Watch, but they’ll do it more for the status of the watch than the functionality. The smartwatch space hasn’t done all that great. Will the Apple Watch change that dynamic? It doesn’t feel like enough for me to want to go back to wearing a watch. Apple is leading with style and so they’ll get some uptake, but I’d like to see a little more substance.

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September 10, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Apple  Health Sensors  Healthcare IT  iPhone  Smart Watch  Wearables
Tags:  Apple Watch    Fuelband    

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?

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September 4, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Health Sensors  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Watch  Wearables
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FitBit Makes You Gain Weight

How’s that for a headline? That’s the story that caught my eye on this NBC – Today show article that talks about the Fitbit, Jawbone Up and Nike Fuelband tracking technology and its impact on people’s weight. First, it’s worth noting that the Today show is talking about fitness trackers. That’s a great sign of the mainstream appeal of these fitness trackers. Although, I guess we have to ask if it’s a fad.

However, back to the original part of the story. Does the FitBit make you gain weight? Obviously, a medical device doesn’t make you gain weight or make you lose weight. However, the information it offers you can influence the choices you make. The article talks about how one person compared the estimated calories burn vs the estimated calories eaten and there was a disconnect with what was happening with their body. According to the fitbit, they were burning a lot more calories than they were taking in, but they were still gaining weight.

What this highlights to me is something most of us have known forever. Weight loss is really hard and is a much more complicated problem than we want it to be. It’s simple to say that it should just be a mathematical equation of calories in and calories burned, but it’s not that simple. People’s metabolism matters. The type of calories you eat matters. I could keep going, but you get the point.

We should of course know this since the weight loss industry has to be a trillion dollar industry. People will spend hordes of money losing weight. Unfortunately, much of that money is spent on things that don’t get results. However, it’s worth noting that it’s not often the devices fault as much as the user error (or lack of user use).

Let’s also be clear that we’re still really early on in the fitness tracker and other wearable sensor technology evolution. Five more years from now I think the sensors and algorithms will be so much better than today. Although, I might be most hopeful that people will find some amazing psychological solutions that really change people’s behavior for good. The potential is there to make an enormous difference in so many people’s lives.

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August 6, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
Tags:  Jawbone Up    Today Show

Apple Health and HealthKit – I’m Extremely Skeptical

Everyone is buzzing over the latest announcement from Apple at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that an Apple Health app and HealthKit (for healthcare developers) will be included in the latest iOS release (iOS8). The announcement was a little weak for me because it had already been leaked that the announcement was coming and also because the details of what it will do are really glossed over.

Whenever I hear an announcement without many details I start to wonder if it’s just vaporware right now. I think it is in this case. Instead of Apple offering a healthcare product that they know people need and will use, it feels like they’ve seen the growth of the health tracker and wearables market and they’re just throwing something out there to see if it works.

This HuffPo article compared the Apple HealthKit to what Apple did in iTunes. That’s so out of touch with the reality of healthcare apps. Music is a simple thing (not the rights part, but the usage part) that everyone understands. If you give them the music, then the consumer can go to town with it. Health data is much more complex.

The reality of health data is that it often has little value without some sort of outside expert analysis. This becomes even more important when you start mixing multiple sources of data into one interface like Apple will be doing with HealthKit. Sure, if Apple was focused on making all of the data they collected from all these third parties into smart, actionable data, then I’d be really excited. However, they’re not doing this at all. They’re just going to be a dumb platform that anyone can connect to and the smartest thing it will do is send you a notification. However, the outside application will have to prompt it to even do that.

I don’t think that Apple HealthKit is all bad. Maybe it will make it easier for developers to code their application once and then be able to connect their application to any blood pressure cuff out there. If they can do that, it would provide a lot of value to entrepreneurs in the space. However, it won’t transform health as we know it the way some people are describing it.

I also love people propping up the names of the Mayo Clinic and Epic. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault had some similar names as well. How are they doing? A name doesn’t mean you’ll get a result.

The Epic name is interesting. However, I’m not very confident that bringing one closed garden together with another closed garden is really going to produce a lot of results. I’ll get back to you when I actually see them announce what they’re really doing together. Until then, this just feels like Epic and Apple had dinner together and said that it would be great if they could work together. If they had more, they sure didn’t talk about it on stage. So, I’m skeptical of what will really come out of the partnership.

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June 4, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Apple  Health Care  Healthcare API  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Samsung’s $50 Million Digital Health Investment Fund

Fred Pennic over at HIT Consultant posted a great story about the new $50 million digital health initiative coming out of Samsung. Here’s a portion of Fred’s article about the announcement:

The new initiative will utilize a new health open reference design platform tailored to take advantage of the latest sensors, behavioral algorithms, battery technologies and displays.
To aggressively support this initiative, Samsung has also announced a $50 million investment fund dedicated to innovative start-ups and technologies in the digital health space. The goal of the fund is to stimulate creative new approaches to digital health and Samsung’s open platforms.

I’ve long been interested in the role that cell phone companies will play in the digital health space and specifically in the health sensors space. There’s always been a bit of a problem for me with the various health sensors out there in the market today. I just don’t care enough about them to wear one every day. The watch comes closest to a natural product that I could see myself wearing it regularly, but the clip on products just aren’t something I want to do every day. I have too many other things to think about.

Of course, you wouldn’t catch most of us without our cell phones on us. This is why it’s always made sense why the cell phone would be the ultimate health tracker. It doesn’t require a habit change by the end user.

Until this cell phone-health sensor vision comes to fruition we’re going to have to limp along with these other wearable technologies and no doubt Samsung wants to be a major player in that space so they know which ones are worth integrating into their cell phones down the road. With that in mind, $50 million seems like a small investment for them to make in the space.

I personally see this $50 million fund as a small down payment by Samsung on what will likely become a much larger investment for them in healthcare.

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May 29, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Android  Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones  Wearables
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Decline of Health and Fitness Tracker Usage

I’ve started hearing a number of people mention this. In some cases it’s first hand accounts of their own usage and in other cases it’s people talking about the health and fitness tracker usage trend. Basically, it seems that we haven’t yet figured out how to make a health and fitness tracker sticky. This chart from Edneavour Partners shows the tracker usage trend really well:
Health and Fitness Tracker Usage

From my own personal experience, I’ve found a similar usage curve. The big challenge is that the value of the tracker 3 months out isn’t clear. When you first start using the tracker, the data is quite interesting because you’ve never seen the fitness tracking data. Plus, you’re interested to see how it changes over time. Once you reach the 3 month plateau, you already basically know the patterns and so they lose their value.

What’s not clear is whether these companies (or some outside company) will find a way to leverage a long term history of tracking into something really valuable. Will having blood pressure trends for 3 years make it so you can detect potential health issues that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise? I think this is the potential for the quantified self movement, but I’m skeptical that the current set of trackers and sensors will get us there. How much value can be gotten from steps, weight, and blood pressure? I think we’ll need a more advanced set of trackers to be able to reach that longer term goal.

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May 21, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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EKG As A Password

I’ve heard a lot of different biometric passwords in my day, but I hadn’t heard of using your EKG as a password until Dr. Patricia Salber pointed it out on her blog, The Doctor Weighs In. Here’s a video of Dr. Salber talking about the new technology called the Nymi.

I can see problems with using the EKG as a password, but I still love that they’re working on it. Maybe it won’t be the cure to passwords that we all want, but this could also be a continuous EKG monitor, no? My feeling is that by digging into the uniqueness of the EKG for personal identification, we’ll discover and learn a lot about our personal EKG.

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April 3, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Gadgets  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Wearable Tech and Form Factor

This tweet really got my juices flowing as I consider the movement with wearable tech and the various form factors we see hitting the mobile health world.

I love when someone immediately discounts a form factor as something that people won’t use. You have to remember that their response is just one data point. There could be an entire customer segment that will have no problem with or may even prefer that form factor.

I think we have to remember that we’re still in the very early stages of figuring out which mobile health form factors are going to become most popular. What’s not going to change is the impact of having an always on, always connected device attached to a variety of sensors. This is the future of mobile health regardless of the various form factors.

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March 5, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Eyeware Computing  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Fitbit Force Sales Stopped and Voluntary Recall Begins

The CEO of Fitbit has announced that they have stopped sales of the Fitbit Force and offered a voluntary recall. If you have a Fitbit Force and would like to get a refund, they have set up a dedicated page on their website or call .

Here’s a comment from the CEO about the reason for the recall:

Late last year, we began selling Fitbit Force, our most advanced activity tracker. Recently, some Force users have reported skin irritation. While only 1.7% of Force users have reported any type of skin irritation, we care about every one of our customers. On behalf of the entire Fitbit team, I want to apologize to anyone affected.

Of course, we know the difference in number between people who report problems and those that have them is very different. It is interesting that their test results show that users are likely experiencing allergic contact dermatitis.

When you think about a watch based product like this, you’d think that the science of materials for watches would be solid. It seems really odd to me that Fitbit and their pile of investor dollars didn’t tap into this science to avoid an issue like this.

The timing for this is also interesting with so many people touting the Fitbit Force as their giveaway at HIMSS 2014. Well, I guess winners now have an easy way to cash it in for $130 if they want as opposed to heading to eBay.

James Park, Fitbit CEO, does note that they’re working on their next generation tracker. I won’t be surprised if the Fitbit Force brand never sees the light of day again. I’m pretty sure they’ll want to take the lessons learned and move forward and put the Force behind them.

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February 21, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
Tags:          James Park

Fitness Tracker Apps Ranked

Time recently ranked the various Fitness trackers. I can never resist a list, so I thought I’d share their list. They offer some more commentary on their list, but I think the totality of the list itself is the most interesting thing. Look how many fitness tracker options there are out there.

26. Polar Electro Wearlink + Transmitter with Bluetooth

25. Under Armour Armour39

24. Sigma Sport R1

23. Scosche Rhythm

22. Adidas Pacer Bundle

21. Polar Electro H7

20. Polar Electro H6

19. Polar Electro Stride Sensor

18. Iqua Beat

17. BodyMedia FIT Link

16. Fitbit Zip

15. LifeTrak Move C300

14. SYNC Burn

13. Jawbone Up24

12. BodyMedia FIT Core

11. Striiv Play

10. Nike Fuelband

9. Nike Fuelband SE

8. Jawbone UP

7. Lark Life

6. Fitbit Flex

5. Withings Pulse

4. Misfit Wearables Shine

3. Basis B1

2. Fitbit One

1. Fitbit Force

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January 21, 2014 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 13 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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