Activity trackers have always been a mixed bag in terms of their utility as a technology. In regular guise, they're not exactly fashionable wristwear. Most of them are not what one would call cheap. And most importantly, they are a little pointless.
Let's look at it from a technology standpoint. The computer revolutionised what humans were capable of doing by speeding up, automating and connecting things. The smartphone did the same thing, on the go. The activity tracker, well, tells you how far you walked. As a piece of technology, it does not do anything that humans are not already capable of doing.
We've been walking around for millenia. We've also been learning to lose weight since junk food and sedentary lifestyles became a thing; and we've been doing it without technological aid.
That said, it is a data-driven world we live in now, and everyone likes quantifiable information. So, when I was gifted a tracker about a month ago, I strapped it on merrily and began monitoring my progress on its companion app. A week in, a baseline was established, I figured out how much I walked and slept on an average day.
Two weeks in, the data started talking. I realised my sleep cycle was more even when I slept in a certain position, and how much sleep I was losing in the first week of discovering an addictive new game.
The little band on my wrist became a constant reminder of goals to meet.
Elevators were shunned, staircases were rediscovered, and the nearby tea shop was at times abandoned for one further down the road (though since the goal was still tea, the health benefit here is debatable).
It was about a month in that the sheen wore off and the roadblock arrived. Apart from statistics that hovered in the same region day after day, the tracker did little to make me want to get fitter. This is the problem these devices have struggled to address in their quest for relevance. They're more advanced than smartphone pedometers, but lack the brainpower of full-fledged smartwatches, and remain a one-trick pony sandwiched between the two. It became apparent pretty soon, that salvation lay in software.
It's not like manufacturers have not figured this out. Fitbit, which has almost become a synonym for the activity tracker and shipped 21 million units last year (according to IDC's worldwide quarterly wearable device tracker), is among the players that has realised this. The company's companion app is a robust suite that features achievement rewards, events, and a strong community element that helps people spur each other on and beat targets set by peers.
The data here is being used to give Fitbit wearers a sense of challenge and achievement, and the sales volumes speak for themselves. The company has reportedly invested close to 70 million dollars in R&D in the first quarter of this year, and no doubt a chunk of that will go towards ensuring that users get more value out of the data their trackers generate.
In the last week, my own tracker got more work to do, thanks to Niantic Inc. finally introducing Pokemon Go to the world. The location-based game, which requires users to move around real world locations to progress, saw me exploring new localities to join in the fun of catching and training Pokemon. A happy side effect of this new pastime being that the stale stats on my app saw a spike of activity, and it feebly congratulated me on meeting my daily goal.
The wearable market is growing rapidly and dragging activity trackers along with it. While Fitbit spends millions in marketing and research, and leans on its strong community to keep the cogs turning, competitors like Jawbone are not seeing the same growth, and others such as Nike's Fuel band have been long abandoned. Xiaomi is seeing some success with its aggressive pricing, but at the end of the day the sub-Rs.1,000 Mi Band and the Fitbit Charge HR priced close to Rs.15,000 will generate similar tracking results (barring heart rate, which Xiaomi have recently introduced in the Mi Band 2). The activity tracker then, is one of the most ridiculous success stories of the decade.
But as long as there is software that provides incentive and rewards based on the actionable data it generates, it’ll be around, silently tracking away.
