optimistic about something’s or someone’s prospects
bull·ish
This monday I was having a somewhat heated discussion with my mother on the general future of health. It all started when I discussed the future of brick and mortar stores and malls. With the addition of self-driving cars, she felt that people would never go out anymore and lose whatever passive calorie expenditure we have left.
While it’s not an invalid point, I think people probably overstate the caloric importance that walking at the mall would bring. The important aspect is that if you do an effort to get out and walk, you are usually also focusing on other elements like the diet which accounts for the major portion of the calorie deficit required for weight loss. Because companies like Google and Amazon are removing frictions in our lives doesn’t have to imply that we are going to get unhealthier.
Health tech is not popular
Instead of asking “what problem should I solve?” ask “what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?”
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of the health tech space is the essay “Schelp Blindness” by Paul Graham (all his essays are amazing btw!). There are decades of behavioural research and theory to testify to the complexity of the task on top of the fitness industry that has a business model built around the fact that you will most likely drop out of an exercise program within the first 1-3 month(s).
There’s lots of people working to make us LESS healthy – it’d be nice if you could support the people trying to make us MORE healthy.
This fact is mentioned in an article PandoDaily ran monday called “All the fitness apps in the world won’t make us thin“. It’s a common article to see in the tech press (there is understandably a lot of doubt), but it did make a few of founders come out of the woodwork to comment. The comment by Jason Shen struck a real chord with me, but a lot of the other comments were good as well. Discussions around health topics are generally very polarizing.
The PandoDaily article did have a few important points. A solution needs to be convenient for the user. I also don’t think that an advertising revenue model is going to work there, but people could make it work. Who knows. I actually disagree with the article’s interpretation of the PEW report. I saw a lot of positive indicators in the report. The fact 60% of people track weight, diet or exercise routine is, in my opinion, very significant. The issue is that people 50% track with their heads because it is more convenient even if we, humans, are terrible at it. This creates a bad feedback for the person.
Convenience and the advent of wearable computing
I don’t know how many times a day I now reach into my pocket to pull out my phone. If I had to guess, I’d guess a hundred. Maybe it’s a lot more.
I’m going to back to convenience as this is the cornerstone of everything. Never in history has a device as powerful (sensors, processing power, storage, etc.) as the smart phone been so close to a person. Which is why I am so excited about the fact that devices are getting smaller and closer to you each year.
The writing is on the wall for wearable computing (things like watches and glasses) which reduces the friction of the user with the device even more. Devices like Fitbit and FuelBand are stand-alone devices only because that’s the only way they can exist, but give it a couple more years and developers will be able to incredibly cool things with generic devices like today’s smartphones.
The insanity of it all
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
– Albert Einstein
This quote sums up the essence the issue at hand. Each year in a cycle that transcends the cliché into researched behaviour, people proceed to do the same thing, use the same tools and fail in a very predictable way. It is normal for people to doubt that things will change, but they eventually do and it always seems obvious in retrospect.
In that way, I look at most of the behavioural research done in the past and I wonder what impact the smart phone or other devices could have had on their outcome. Eventually, I decided to stop wondering and slowly start working on it.
This is my first health related article. I do plan on doing a lot more in the future! I would like to point out that I would not call myself an expert, but I do spend a lot of time reading on the subject.