Health Wearable User Abandonment: Fitbit = 50%, Apple Watch = 6%
Dr. Robert Pearl of the Permanente Medical Group recently implied that wearable tech fitness trackers like the Fitbit don’t serve much purpose in medical practice. While Fitbit does have a disappointing user abandonment rate of 50%, general purpose wearables like the Apple Watch—which has sold an estimated 5-6 million units—has a tiny 6% abandonment rate. And 83% of users state that the apps like the three-rings (activity and stand-up alerts) have contributed to their overall health and fitness. Also, the Hello Heart app reported that Apple Watch users were nearly 4 times more likely to stick with the cardiovascular health management program vs other users. They discovered that 25% of users decreased their blood pressure by 22 points or more.
Coming back to how we get wearable tech and other digital health data into the medical system, Drew Schiller, co-founder and CTO of Validic, a Durham, North Carolina-based vendor that provides access to data from digital health apps and devices (and one of my valued ecosystem partners), agreed that consumer/patient-generated digital data must be provided to a physician and care management team in a form that makes it actionable. “Patient-generated data is useful for showing health trends,” according to Schiller. So if that’s the case, it seems that as we see the wearable tech market doubling in the next four years, there will be a wealth of data available to healthcare systems with an interest in seeing patient trends and influencing their behavior, especially to prevent, manage, and even predict chronic disease. According to the CDC, chronic, behavior-based diseases account for 86% of healthcare costs.
This article discusses the intrusiveness of wearables et al and other issues of these technologies as they relate to healthcare outcomes and communications arena and whether pharma marketers should get on the bandwagon.