Thinking Healthcare Wearables Strategy

A lot of media excitement about wearables has focused on applications for lifestyle and fitness. Activity trackers such as Fitbit and Garmin’s vívofit have become a big hit with gadget lovers who want to quantify the steps they take, the hours they sleep, and the calories they consume. Google Glass, another high-profile wearable, is a hands-free, head-mounted mobile device that could have come straight out of science fiction. These lifestyle wearables are technically intriguing and answer the deepest desires of the Quantified Self movement (“self-knowledge through numbers”), but for most people they’re little more than optional “nice-to-haves.” In this paper we discuss the impact of wearables on healthcare.