Smart dress market in full swing developers ignore core users

As the internet of things has become a reality, more steps are recorded in people's lives, more sleep patterns are preserved and more exercise is applied, according to the online website, November 7. But these figures are not much more reasonable and ambitious. Developers ignore users who really need wearable equipment and are flocking to the already saturated young market to collect superficial data about these healthy people.

Developers should be ashamed because the people who are most likely to benefit from the technology, such as the elderly, the chronically ill and the poor, are ignored. In fact, these companies are more interested in helping the rich to practice their abs and run 5-kilometer than with the FDA, the HIPPA (the Medical Electronic Exchange Act). This could be their own suicide, because the medical sector is actually a very lucrative market, with a global spending of 2 trillion dollars a year on chronic diseases.

Fitbit and Jawbone have demonstrated their augmented reality technology at the wearable and IoT conference in Washington, which gives us a glimpse of the industry's current development: Lee (Peter Li) is a biomedical student at Johns Hopkins University, He invented a watch that accurately calculates the number of push-ups; Nike's chief scientist questioned some of the data collected by the current smart watch (steps, temperatures and blood oxygen levels), claiming that the information was irrelevant to the measurement of athletic performance, emphasizing the importance of an intelligent algorithm for analyzing human behavior. Adidas showed us a heart rate sensor that would not be able to recognize the company's biometric sports bra.

Then Qualcomm Life Company's business development director Cabille Kasagud (Kabir Kasagood) debut, this is a manufacturer of wearable equipment semiconductor companies. Kasagud suggested that developers should stop investing in the saturated market and turn to embrace the health care industry. "We should leave our children's tables and turn to adult tables," he says. "If you're really determined to do this, you should open your arms to the FDA, get to know Hippa, connect your equipment to electronic medical records, and comply with all the medical laws and regulations." This market is extremely deficient in innovation, I am willing to leave the field of fitness, into the medical field, this is the place to make money. ”

But the audience's response was cold, after all, regulatory boredom, clinical trials are one of the resistance, and the old system docking is more boring, security requirements and user data restrictions may also affect the change. Seems to be to corroborate this view, a few minutes later IStrategy Labs's marketing director at the scene to show a Dorothy Shoe folder, users only need to use the heel of three steps through Uber can call a car.

As at September 30, there were 266 wearable equipment (118 for fitness equipment), of which 23 had been retired. From Silicon Valley to San Francisco, from Austin to MIT, many young, healthy, highly educated male entrepreneurs are developing small applications and devices for people like themselves. In fact, from personal computers to the Internet to social media, much of the information technology we are currently using is starting with this. Technology developers, as early adopters of technology, know that our mothers are also using these technologies. Silicon Valley assumes that health and health technologies will follow the same path.

But if you really want to chase profits and really understand the people who have benefited most from health and health technology, the Silicon Valley assumption is untenable. In fact, wearable technology is not the same as the Internet or smartphones. More than half of the American users who have already purchased the campaign tracker have discarded the devices, and one-third of users have thrown them into drawers or simply sent them after six months of buying the equipment.

So who will monitor and track their health metrics for a long time? The answer is for people with two or more chronic illnesses. According to the Pew data, 45% of Americans suffer at least one chronic disease. Only 19% per cent of people without chronic disease tracked their health data, and 40% of those with a chronic disease did so, compared with 62% of people with more than two chronic illnesses. Up to now, the cost of wearable medical equipment has reached $2.8 billion trillion this year and is expected to increase to $8.3 billion in the next five years. If you multiply the sales of 2014 fitness bracelets and smart watches by 6, you still won't be able to exceed the 6.3 billion U.S. dollar glycemic test paper sales in the US market this year.

Patients with chronic illnesses do not suddenly abandon wearable devices because of a loss of freshness, and the ability to track, measure and quantify health data can keep them away from hospitals. But there are still a lot of developers who would rather create some boring stuff in the hacking marathon than develop applications and devices for these people.

At some point, developers should ask themselves, are they more afraid of HIPPA safety standards, the FDA approval process, or just unwilling to develop products for people who don't like themselves?

Now that society is increasingly plagued by aging and chronic diseases, and our annual commitment to offsetting our economic achievements, can our innovation rise to the heights of meeting these challenges? Or are you just content to call a car with a Uber three?

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)