Why Health Innovators Have Failed Customers & What We Can Do About It

IMAGE BY KEVIN DOOLEY

Tyrone Ceaser is a professor of exercise science at Winthrop University in South Carolina. He also research, blogs, and consults on topics related to wearable tech, wellness, fitness, and stress management. You can find him on Twitter @drtyroneceaser.

Wellness devices don’t help people lose weight unless the underlying mentality for change is already present. But most mass producers of these devices are not in the business of selling this point. They are in the business of selling products.

By the same token, research studies and fitness programs don’t help people adopt change unless a major paradigm shift occurs in the mind. But many wellness coaches, personal trainers, academic researchers, and the like are not in the business of mediating change in minds and hearts. They are in the business of successful, quick-fix, low-risk, high-selling services and products instead of long-term, strategic, high-investment strategies that alleviate consumers of their physical, heavy-laden, lifestyle-related burdens.

Guess who’s stuck in the middle of the seller and servicer? You. The consumer. You’re stuck in the middle trying to figure out who can get you back to your high school body in the fastest, most efficient way possible.

But wait! You have yet another burden.

In addition to your potential investment in a wristwatch or wellness program, you want to get back to an "image" of the past (yeah, the one the made you feel most secure about your body).

The problem in the wellness industry isn’t the length of the longitudinal study or the lack of a p-value indicating statistical significance. It’s not type, accuracy, or cost of the device. It’s not the failure of scientists in charge of billions of research dollars devoted to solving the obesity epidemic.  

It’s the congruency of the minds involved (yours being chief among them), and inevitably, the intentions of the buyers and servicers.  

If I told a client, "I can help you lose 30 pounds in 30 days" or "I can help you gain 20 pounds of muscle mass in 20 days," it’s true. I could probably do it. But it wouldn’t be the complete truth.

If a tech company advertises a new wrist watch with such elegance, beautiful marketing, and promising potential to help you lose weight, they wouldn’t be lying either. In the end, you wonder, who should I run to? What should I invest in? Too often this question is asked by millions of consumers like you, who eventually run to the wellness device, the personal trainer, and sometimes even the research study (5 years and 20+ pounds of gained weight later).

Though it is true that the device can solve the problem of tracking health parameters such as heart rate and blood pressure, the last time I checked, it sure doesn’t have the agency to lower either of those metrics. By the same token, the trainer nor the researcher has the agency to cause long-term, life-lasting change by creating a proven evidence-based strategy to lose weight and keep it off. If that were the case, NIH would have ceased that branch of research a long time ago and moved on to something else.

What I neglected to mention so far is this: you’ll probably gain it all back within two months or lose the muscle mass in the same amount of time.

There is something to be said about the plethora of fitness trainers, weight loss specialists, and health coaches out on the market. There are so many! Heck, can you blame anyone for wanting to be on the profit side of a $500 billion dollar market?

Now, consumer, I turn to the people you seek out to support you.

To the professors, scientists, trainers, marketers, and wellness professionals, myself included: We have not successfully reversed the trend of lifestyle diseases.

The amount of research dollars spent for "treating" obesity, diabetes, strokes, and other lifestyle diseases is insane, especially since our kids, moms, dads, and others still can't make weight.

What's wrong with these wellness programs out on the market? It's simple: we're not teaching men to fish in order to feed themselves for life.  

Our wellness profession is cluttered with the wrong goals and intentions. In turn, the message becomes misconstrued with ill-placed facts, 5 minute, "Google-search" generated research, and the desire for career advancement. Marketers find the best SEO strategies to "lure ‘em in," and figure out what they're looking for, while completely ignoring the fact that individually, no two people suffer from obesity in the same manner. Therefore, customized, tailored programs should replace multi-site, data-driven, population-based obesity research.  

Sure, that type of research is good for some situations, but obviously it's not working now––and hasn't been for a while. I see many researchers achieve most funding success by figuring out the most popular types of studies being funded. Then they put in their bids for R01s and R03s, with the hopes of landing one major grant to stamp their academic tenure guarantee, thereby securing two birds with one stone.

In conclusion, am I saying that professionals don’t care about the people in the other boat? No. What I am saying, is that we need to understand the consumer’s needs and put them first.

Consumer, are you aware of your needs? Why do you need to lose weight? Who does it benefit other than you? Why is your blood pressure skyrocketing? Who else watches you eat and potentially models themselves after your habits? No, you don’t look like Hugh Jackman in X-men, but do you have an amazing ability to focus and serve others for long periods of time, without fatigue, because you ate kale chips and apples, instead of the 6-piece from Chick-fil-A? (There's nothing wrong with that on occasion, by the way.)

These are the questions you should be asking yourself.  

The message for professionals is plain and simple: do a better job of teaching men to fish. And for you as a consumer, you should watch and learn, fishing from your own boat, with your own reel. It’s the only way real change is possible.

3 Mistakes to Avoid in Wearable Design for Older Adults

Image by Robert Scoble

Brittany Weinberg is project manager and influence specialist for the MedStar Center for Health Influence and Engagement at the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2), and today she shares a guest post with Zansors on wearables for an older population. There are common pitfalls innovators need to understand––and avoid––in order to successfully support older adults who often have one or more chronic conditions.

Stakes are high when we consider wearables for older adults. On one hand, the healthcare support a wearable can provide this population is an immense opportunity to affect quality of life and overall health. On the other hand, it’s a demographic that requires special considerations, and often involves large government stakeholders like Medicare.

This presents obstacles to innovators that have not been fully explored. Best practices are yet to be defined in this new space, so it’s clear common mistakes are not generally due to a lack of trying or caring. It is difficult as an innovator to balance the daily tasks of designing a product and running a company while also seeing the broader, macro landscape of wearable technology, particularly as it relates to an older generation. In the meantime, here are three mistakes that are common yet avoidable if you know what to look for.

Mistake #1: Not Understanding Regulations

Rules and regulations are responding to the evolving nature of technology and ever-changing landscape of healthcare. Innovators should understand current regulations, particularly around Medicare and Medicaid, and plan for regulation changes, so that they can anticipate emerging trends and hack existing trends.

• Understanding the regulations helps innovators designing wearables:
• Appreciate current trends and anticipate changes
• Recognize where regulations are spurring (and funding) innovations
• Identify opportunities for regulatory hacking 

Recently, 1776 spent an entire day discussing hacking regulations. Where are the gaps? Where can innovators utilize their experience, creativity, and technology to create solutions to for the problems of today (and yesterday)? And why should innovators hack regulations?

Want to learn more about regulatory hacking? Listen to this great podcast on regulatory hacking.

So, what does this mean for your wearable?

You’ll need to stay up-to-date on rules and regulations that directly or indirectly impact your wearable, and maintain enough flexibility in your product design to respond to regulation changes and opportunities as well as regulation hack opportunities.

Mistake #2: Undervaluing Empathy in Your Design Process

You may think you know, but do you really know?

Many older adults suffer or will suffer from one or more chronic conditions, which likely impacts your wearable design. It is imperative to then incorporate empathy into your design process, as Forbes explains in their article, “Design Thinking: A Unified Framework For Innovation.”

Ask your users questions that will reveal insights on how they may use your wearable and the benefits your wearable would bring to them. For example: Will you describe the problems you encounter when ABC? What workarounds are you using to accomplish your XYZ goals? If you could remove an obstacle from XYZ, what would it be? What do you wish you could change right now? And what is your desired state (i.e. what is best-case scenario)?

Experience the product with your users. Ask them to help you see their obstacles for yourself and to show you how they currently solve problems. Walk their walk, live their story, learn their perspective as if it is your own. Only then can you begin to design a wearable that meets their needs and in a sustainable manner. As many of us are deeply aware, abandonment rate of wearables is still a concern, and that is true for older users as well.

Keep in mind that there is a difference between the purchaser of the wearable and the users of the wearable. Even within “users” of the wearable, there are different categories: Those who wear it to generate data (i.e. the older adult), those who review/collect the data, those who respond accordingly to the data, and more.

What does this mean for your wearable?

You’ll want to start user testing as early as possible. As developers of Path Feel and Path Finder found, user testing may confirm your understanding of how the user would interact with the product and it may reveal some tweaks that need to be made. Also, recognize the different stakeholders that will touch your wearable: the purchaser, the wearer/user, the reviewer/collector of the data, those responding to the data, etc.

Read more on this topic in AARP’s report on 50+ consumers of activity and sleep trackers.

Mistake #3: Not Using Wearables to Bring Together Multiple Stakeholders

Wearables have the unique attributes of collecting important information in real time, sharing it with appropriate parties, and impacting behaviors in order to improve lives. This is especially important for innovating for vulnerable older adults, because of quality of life repercussions. These attributes can be the “bring-together-er” of many stakeholders, including regulators, healthcare providers, family caregivers, architects, wellness coaches, and members of the community.

The aforementioned attributes are ripe for bringing stakeholders together to tackle some of the aging field’s biggest issue:

• Improve outcomes*
• Reduce costs*
• Assist older adults as they age in place
• Enhance quality of life
• Improve patient experience* 

* Goals of Medicare “Triple Aim”

What does this mean for your wearable?

As you design your wearable, consider expanding the scope of stakeholders that you originally had in mind. Incorporate them into your design, so that your wearable is not simply a quick fix for a sticky problem, but rather a scalable, sound solution that has multiple players involved and has the potential to improve the lives of older adults everywhere.

So what does this all mean? The way we identify these common pitfalls is by learning from what’s already on the market, listening to consumers and witnessing first-hand what doesn’t work. It’s our collective experience that shows us the way, which means collaboration among innovators is critical to realizing the potential that wearables presents to the healthcare market.

And, that is the reason it is imperative to surround yourself with a talented, passionate team. As we like to say the MedStar Institute for Innovation:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. – African Proverb