Fitness data GOLD MINE
Insurance wants to track info through Apple Watch, Fitbit
Life insurance company John Hancock made a splash recently with the news that soon all of its policies would come bundled with the option to let the company track your fitness, via either a website and app, or through the use of a fitness tracker like an Apple Watch or Fitbit.
The move underscores how fitness tracker data is an as-yet largely untapped gold mine for businesses — particularly in industries like insurance, whose financial bottom line directly depends on the health of their customers. John Hancock isn’t particularly shy about this: “The longer people live, the more money we make,” as the company’s CEO Brooks Tingle put it to the New York Times.
The published research on Fitbits and similar devices, however, has yet to uncover a clear link between fitness tracking and fitness, to say nothing of longevity and mortality, or of insurance companies’ profits. But there is some solid evidence that if the use of the devices is paired with incentives like rewards, challenges and leaderboards (“gamified,” in social science parlance) people can see real health benefits. It’s probably no accident, then, that the John Hancock policies lean heavily on those kinds of incentives.
The big question: Will potential insurance customers buy it?
Since fitness trackers are attached to your body, they’re capable of providing a realtime fire hose of data on the most intimate aspects of your existence: where you go, when you sleep, how much you weigh, how fast your heart is beating, and so on. Athletes and people interested in maintaining or increasing their fitness are naturally interested in this data, and the numbers are fun to track over time for anyone with even a passing interest in what makes their bodies tick.
Devices like the Fitbit are predicated on the idea that tracking these numbers is the first step toward improving them: “Know yourself to improve yourself,” as the company’s homepage puts it. But researchers who’ve studied how these devices are actually used in the real world have found that it’s not quite that simple.
One randomized controlled trial based in Singapore, one of the largest such studies on fitness trackers done to date, found in 2016 “no evidence of improvements in health outcomes” relative to a control group, among people who were randomly assigned to use a Fitbit. A similar study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016 found that among 470 overweight young adults, people randomly assigned a fitness tracker actually lost slightly less weight over a twoyear period than the group that did not receive a tracker.
These studies come with some caveats, including the fact that the actual trials involved were carried out between 2010 and 2014, using early-generation fitness trackers that lacked many of the bells and whistles of today’s models. Newer models have a whole suite of incentives designed to get people using their devices more, and hence increasing their activity levels.
Fitbit, for instance, offers badges for achievements, like walking 20,000 steps in one day or climbing the equivalent of 100 floors. They have leaderboards, where users can compete against friends, family and strangers to see who can crank the most steps or miles out of a day or month. The devices can be set up to nudge users with reminders when they’re a few hundred steps behind a given goal for a day.
Interventions like these may seem kind of goofy and childish, but research says they work. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Heart Association, for instance, found that among sedentary office workers, Fitbits used in conjunction with office-wide leaderboards and challenges were more effective at getting workers out of their seats than Fitbits alone.