Do you own a Fitbit or another health tracker? If not, you probably know someone who does. Over the last few years, wearable technology has made the transition from our wildest dreams to our everyday wardrobe, opening a world of enticing possibilities for healthcare marketers.
From Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine blueprints, Jules Verne’s diving suit in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, to Dick Tracy’s communicator watch, people have been imagining the potential of wearable technology for ages. As with these and countless other examples of wearable technology since, ideas that were science fiction at the time eventually became realities.
Maybe that’s because of how attractive wearable tech is to our imaginations. It’s personal, it works exclusively for whoever wears it and it can enhance our abilities. In fact, much of the technology that is now common on mobile and wearable devices was originally intended to enhance the abilities of the disabled.
Voice control, gesture inputs and many more all started as tools for accessibility. Combined with maturing technology for geolocation and near field communication (NFC), wearable tech is uniquely poised to bring value to the health, wellness and pharmaceutical space.
It’s More Than Devices—It’s the Data
Some of the most immediate opportunities for wearable tech lie in unbranded health and wellness support. Brands such as Fitbit and Jawbone not only motivate consumers to make the best choices for their health—they present opportunities to create feedback loops to drive positive behaviors.
Of course, establishing an effective feedback loop means collecting the right data—and lots of it. Wearable tech is uniquely positioned for such data collection. For instance, Apple’s HealthKit allows multiple sources to contribute data to create a fuller, holistic picture of health and behavior. The framework allows smartphones, watches and even embedded medical devices such as insulin pumps to share data with each other, interpret it holistically, and then help users make smarter decisions about their overall health.
Easing the Burden of Disease Management
It’s no secret that one of the most targeted markets in our industry is the patient with chronic conditions and multiple comorbidities. Managing conditions such as diabetes and heart disease requires the patient to make sense of many streams of complex information—from lifestyle adjustments to drug information to dosing schedules and more. Wearable technology not only allows these patients to delegate key disease-management tasks with applications such as appointment and medication reminders, it can also flag and report crucial changes in a patient’s data stream that could indicate a serious complication and notify members of an approved circle of care.
Wearables that collaborate with other devices can automate much of the health-management process. This is especially beneficial to patients with complex, chronic health conditions. For example, imagine a diabetic patient who uses a smartwatch, iPhone and Bluetooth-enabled insulin pump. The smartwatch (which tracks activity level) could coordinate with the insulin pump (which tracks dosing) to warn patients when they’re straying outside their usual safe ranges—and buzz their wrist as an immediate reminder to make a dosing adjustment.
If that isn’t sufficient and the situation progresses to the point of a medical emergency, a personal-area network of wearable devices could use the smartphone to automatically notify family members or EMS of the situation.
Branding Wearable Tech
Once wearables have helped ease the burden of disease management, consumers who use them will be freed up to engage on a branded level. Here, the technology enables new, intelligent behaviors using existing marketing techniques.
For example, marketers have been using GPS and NFC to send advertisements to consumers’ smartphones for a while now. This allows marketers to send advertisements more intelligently based on context, such as a consumer’s physical proximity to businesses. But wearables have an opportunity to better capitalize on that context.
The reason is simple: Wearables are more readily accessible. No missed messages or digging in a purse or pocket to respond. This allows marketers to drive conversions at the moment when consumers are most receptive. Such conversions can be anything from a traditional purchase, enrollment in a CRM program, to social sharing of branded products or messaging.
A few key areas to focus on when crafting engaging brand experiences that your customers will actually want to wear on their bodies include:
Establish credibility: Consumers are already skeptical about branded communication, so it’s imperative that wearable designers establish trust by providing transparency around the use of personal information from day one—especially when that personal information contains personal health information.
Find the sweet spot for notifications: Too many or too few notifications can undermine a piece of wearable technology’s effectiveness. On one hand, communication fatigue can be a killer for branded communications. Consumers are engaging with a wider variety of devices and ecosystems than ever before, so discretion is paramount when choosing the appropriate time to re-engage in an active conversation.
On the other hand, users will disengage if you communicate too infrequently. This is especially true when trying to change consumer behavior by reinforcing desired actions on a regular basis.
With research and user input, it will become clear when your users are most receptive to re-engage in an active conversation and when it’s better to defer them for later.
Don’t try to do too much: While wearables will ideally allow for the quick and easy completion of simple tasks (such as viewing a reminder), more complex tasks (such as program registrations, customization and adjusting personal settings) actually do require that users shift to another method of interaction, such as a tablet or desktop computer.
The upside here is that users are already comfortable making the switch between devices. In fact, Google estimates that 90% of users move sequentially between screens in order to complete a task. The burden is on designers to make that transition as seamless as possible.
If you’re imagining a wearable tech option for your brand, the time to bring it to life has come. With technology advancing at dizzying speeds, wearable tech is rapidly reaching the point where it is only limited by our imaginations. Within a few years, it’s likely that it will be hard to imagine healthcare without it.
