Health wearables: Is there cause for concern?
mHealth devices market is growing at 27 percent per annum. There are takers as people lean towards living a healthy lifestyle. Here's a look at the reasons behind the uptick and concerns behind rapid adoption
Wearables have done an excellent job of marrying technology and a healthy lifestyle very successfully.
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A few years ago, a man called Bob Burdett's life was saved by his smartwatch. Bob, who would meet his son that day, lay unconscious after flipping his bike. In the meantime, his watch had detected the fall and informed 911 to do the needful. Bob's son Gabe got messages with updated locations of his father—right from the point of the accident to the hospital. The incident duly went viral, carrying an extraordinary validation of what smartwatches could do and giving us some clues about the thinking of an 'average' user of a hi-tech wearable. It was revealed that Bob had taken care to turn 'hard fall detection' on in his smartwatch and had also listed Gabe as an emergency contact. Does this hint at any more strands of user psychology that go into wearable use?
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mHealth or mobile health is a term for using wireless technology like mobile devices in the practice or pursuit of health. The health devices market is growing rapidly at 27 percent annually. Most mHealth users say that the wearable helps them to create a healthy lifestyle comprising of eating well, sleeping properly, and exercising daily. The quantified self, representing oneself in relevant data points, has been used to describe mass self-tracking behaviour. In the health and fitness domain, relevant data points are blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep pattern, activity level, and temperature, among others. The wearable user monitors her health through these metrics and uses them as the basis for a healthy lifestyle.
The motivation for using health wearables is layered
A bird's eye view would suggest that pursuing the quantified self is congruent with modern society's love and familiarity with data. The predominant idiom of our time rests somewhere between 'what cannot be measured cannot be improved' to its more popular derivative 'what cannot be counted doesn't count'. This is especially true for the white-collar professional whose day-to-day life involves lots of numbers and counting: from boarding the subway in the nick of time, preparing a deck seasoned with appropriate statistics to convince a room full of bosses, tracking the KPIs on which her bonuses payout, or even watching one's net worth in different assets. A smartwatch is a reasonable and seamless fit in this drill.Wearable use may also have other motivations that we may take an evidence-based guess at. For example, a wearable may depict a valuable cross between conventional and corporate fashion senses. Some users might derive gratification from a wearable that may be tied to self-perception, i.e. helping a user fulfil motivations they have not previously been aware of. An example of a latent motivation is to appear busy or health-conscious because people sometimes perceive users of products indicating busyness or health as important and impressive. Simpler motivations could be at work, too. For example, a user's wearable might be helping her elicit utility from situations like going about a sprawling office complex between meetings. It is also known, for example, that users respond better to the same application on their phone than to their PC—the same might happen to wearables, with users wanting to avoid the information overload or dependency they perceive vis-a-vis the smartphone.
Finally, some users may be more disposed to use a fitness-tracking wearable than others, even beyond mere willingness to pay for a device or the inherent importance of fitness in the user's lifestyle. One may imagine an ideal wearable user to have what psychologists call a systematic cognitive style, defined by a step-by-step approach to thinking and careful planning. A systematic style correlates positively with a trait called conscientiousness. A conscientious person is diligent, can control impulsive actions like binge eating relatively better, plans ahead, can delay gratification, and is known to reflect organisation, responsibility, and self-discipline. These characteristics may even correlate with a successful, goal-oriented urban lifestyle.
