Our healthy obsession with fitness trackers

In 2014, Marc Benioff told the World Economic Forum in Davos that his friend, the computer magnate Michael Dell, had called him, worried that data shared from the Salesforce chief executive’s Fitbit monitor showed he had not been working out.

Benioff explained he had skipped the gym because he was suffering from a cold. But his enthusiasm for wellbeing wearables was infectious. Many more people have equipped themselves with Fitbits, Apple Watches, Whoop bands and other trackers since then.

Benioff and Dell have gone on to invest in Oura Health, maker of a fitness ring that promises in its initial public offering prospectus to “empower people to live healthier, longer”.

Oura this week delayed its flotation, which could have valued the Finnish-American company at about $16bn. The official reason was market uncertainty. But such is Oura users’ devotion to the $400 trackers that it is always possible executives and advisers synced their data that morning and decided to wait until their collective heart rates, sleep numbers and step counts heralded a more propitious outcome.

The company, and others like it, will be back. Some early leaders in the market, such as Jawbone, have dropped out or been absorbed by rivals, as Fitbit was by Google. But the runners still in the race are part of an overall market for consumer wearables forecast to generate $1tn in revenue between 2026 and 2032.

This is good news, and not just for investors. Healthy life expectancy is the metric that really matters for most people, and if we are to live longer, healthier lives then anything that nudges us to pay greater attention to our wellbeing is worth backing. Our health is our wealth, as the saying goes.

Silicon Valley’s billionaires are not the only ones banking on this connected future. In the US, Oura subscriptions and devices are already part of an insurance package for patients who share their sleep data with doctors, helping them detect, monitor and treat conditions such as obstructive sleep apnoea.

In the UK, insurer Vitality offers points to active customers who share fitness data which can help them qualify for lower premiums. Diabetes sufferers increasingly benefit from wearable glucose monitors, linked to apps. A 2022 analysis in The Lancet Digital Health of multiple studies of fitness trackers found that wearing one increased activity, to the tune of 1,800 extra steps per day.

The list of potential unwanted side-effects is long. As Benioff pointed out in 2014, the shared vital signs of listed company executives could become tradeable insider information. If insurers were to link protection too strictly to fitness goals, the unfit might be unable to buy cover at all.

The maxim “what gets measured gets managed” also has a flipside. Some important and hard-to-measure areas — mental rather than physical health, for instance — may be neglected, in an example of the McNamara fallacy, named after the bodycount-obsessed Vietnam-era US defence secretary Robert McNamara.

Fitness trackers can focus effort on restrictive targets, such as the quest to clock 10,000 steps daily, while some users’ cult-like dedication to hitting their goals (and bragging about it) could take a toll on their overall health, not to mention the patience of their friends.

Still, the gap is narrowing between fitness bands as faddish fashion accessories and as the serious healthcare tools some developers and doctors hope they can become. There is much further to go, but, to adapt the Chinese proverb, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with 10,000 steps.