Japanese watchmaker Yamasa Tokei had a cool idea: a small wearable device that uses the natural motions of your body to keep track of how many steps you take. Tokei called his device the Manpo-Kei, roughly translated as "10,000-step meter." That was almost 50 years ago. The problem is that, since then, the pitch for fitness trackers has barely changed.
>It's in those connections that the most surprising -- and surprisingly useful -- insights are most likely to be found.
The curtailing of Nike's Fuelband highlights the problem when wearable tech doesn't offer enough that's new to justify its existence. Keeping track of your steps in an app or getting a badge when you reach a goal might not be enough to justify the purchase of a new piece of hardware, or more importantly to really change your habits for the better. The real power of wearables is more likely to lie not in the devices themselves but in the underlying software layer that integrates your own activity with data from other, seemingly disparate sources. It's in those connections that the most surprising -- and surprisingly useful -- insights are most likely to be found.
That's the potential in a new partnership announced today between Jawbone, the maker of the Up fitness band, and Automatic, which makes what amounts to an activity tracker for cars. Once synced with the Up app, data from Automatic will tell you how many steps you could have earned toward your daily count if you had walked instead of driven. It's like taking that nagging guilt you feel when you drive that half-mile to pick up that carton of milk you forgot and giving it an exact number.
"It doesn't take much," says Ljuba Miljkovic, chief product officer at Automatic. "People know they're supposed to walk more. But when you put a number in front of it, they become aware and mindful."
Such awareness is the kind of value that connected wearable devices can and need to offer to take the next step beyond mere novelty. Tracking calories and steps taken are, as Alexis Madrigal has put it, a great check against bullshitting yourself. But over time, the accumulation of indirectly related data could tell you even more.
Have I gained weight during those last three months when I was driving more trips over shorter distances? What happens to my eating habits when I walk that mile to the grocery store instead of driving? Of course, causation can be tough to isolate and verify out of seeming connections among facts. But it's still worth seeking out those leads.
So far, wearables and their underlying apps aren't realizing that potential, says Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester Research who imagines a future where connected health devices go beyond wristbands into the realm of smart clothes, patches, even "ingestibles" -- sensor-equipped pills that activate when they come into contact with stomach acid. "What I haven't seen yet is companies aggregating the data and drawing insights from multiple data sets that they can then feed back to the consumer," Ask says.
Part of the issue, she says, is that the data can't just be cool. It actually has to be useful. What's the unlikely measurement that really matters to better fitness, the way Billy Beane figured out that slugging meant more than batting average in predicting a baseball team's wins?
For the makers of wearables, figuring out those metrics is vitally important. As smartphones become smarter about tracking activity -- think of the iPhone 5s motion-detection chip, Apple's version of the Manpo-Kei -- wearable device makers have to try that much harder to convince consumers their tech does something different enough to justify buying yet another piece of hardware. The answer likely lies not in the single device itself, but in the platform that connects the wristband to the car to your pooch's collar, as Jawbone is doing in its partnership with dog-activity tracker Whistle.
We here at WIRED have another idea for a connected device that might work. Imagine syncing your activity tracker to your TV, not just to measure your fitness in relation to how much you watch, but to the specific shows. Does a Mad Men marathon turn you into a slothful drinker who can't go a hundred steps without another cigarette? Does your meat intake increase the more you watch Game of Thrones (well, maybe not after Joffrey's wedding). Angel investors, we'll need about $50 million to get this game-changer going. We're calling it CouchFlab.
