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 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Fitness Trackers  Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Wearables
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Tiny Vital Sign Chip

Check out this article that writes about a tiny chip which can make it cheaper and easier to monitor your vital signs.

The technology is called “ultrawideband,” and very well could mean the end of bulky, expensive, power-consuming electronic health monitors that take up space and hurt your wallet. The researchers plan to work with private companies and move the technology into the marketplace by mid-2013.

There are no batteries, and the energy is drawn from radio frequencies via nearby cell phone towers. The information on the chip can be tethered to cell phones and the OSU team has funding to build an app and cloud monitoring for storing the data.

For those of you who clicked over to the article, you’ll realize that the article is from 2012. That’s what I think is so amazing. Imagine what they’ve done since then.

Regardless of this specific technology, the sensors we’re using to monitor our health are getting smaller and smaller and more effective at what they do. How amazing that it’s able to get its power from nearby cell phone towers? Plus, they’re working to offer this chip for only 25 cents.

I love that we’re still barely at the beginning of this health sensor revolution. 10 years from now we’ll look back and this chip will be considered a huge chip.

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April 16, 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 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  Medical Devices  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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A Few Compelling Health 2.0 Tweets

This week the Health 2.0 Conference has been happening in Silicon Valley. The twitter stream has been extremely active if you want to hear what’s being said at the conference. Here are a few nuggets of wisdom from the stream and my thoughts on them.


This is a scary idea to consider, but Francois is right about the cost of healthcare. So far I have seen little that’s working to drive the cost of healthcare down. Are feedback loops the right answer? I’m not sure, but I do think information on the costs is part of the answer.


I hope mobile health and sensors can go deeper than this. Although, I was probably drawn to the tweet because when I was younger I was hugging a girl when she asked, “Why is your heart beating so fast?” I guess she was way ahead of the sensor game.


Is this scary or exciting? I’d probably say 5 years, but otherwise agree.


Reminds me of when Farzad Mostashari asked, “Can Healthcare ‘Step on a Scale’ Today?” Data helps us realize reality.


Reminds me of the off stated, correlation does not equal causation.


Always a great reminder of what should really be the focus of healthcare: the patient.

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October 2, 2013 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 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Health Care  Healthcare IT  mHealth  Mobile Health Care
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