Recent hype
about healthcare tech has been over wearable fitness trackers, but an arguably
more impactful way to be healthy and lose weight is to track eating habits,
something you can already do with a smartphone alone. MyFitnessPal, one of the
first mobile apps to track food intake, is set to broaden its service to track
activity too, marking a direct challenge to the software provided by
wearable devices like Fitbit and Jawbone and an attempt to create one of
the first, comprehensive windows into a person’s health.
MyFitnessPal says it will track fitness activity through a feature
called Steps, and while the feature will sync with data that comes in from
wearable devices like the Fitbit and Jawbone UP, it will also track steps
directly via the iPhone 5S. The app is taking advantage of the phone’s M7 chip,
which is powerful and efficient enough to constantly track activity without
draining the phone’s battery.
MyFitnessPal’s founder and CEO Mike Lee, who wears a black Fitbit
Flex on his wrist, hopes to make activity tracking on his app work with other
smartphones too. He notes the obvious overlap of his app with Fitbit’s,
which also tracks nutrition intake, but adds that “a lot of people prefer ours.
Our users want to be able to see all that data inside of our app.”
Lee has spent the last last nine years building up an enormous
amount of data based on what his more-than 50 million registered users
contribute to the app. “We have the largest database that’s ever existed of
what people eat,” says Lee. “There’s never been something like this.”
Health care providers and researchers have naturally come
knocking at his door in a bid to gain access to that data, but Lee claims to be
“very protective” of it and is holding back for now. While other fitness apps
have open APIs for data sharing, MyFitnessPal’s is private and requires a
formal partnership for that data to be unlocked.
There’s an argument that as smartphones develop more
sophisticated sensors like the Samsung Galaxy S5’s finger-print sensor and
heart rate monitor, they’ll send wearable fitness trackers like the Fitbit
towards obsolescence. Smartphones did the same for in-car navigation, after
all, following the short-lived popularity of TomToms and Garmins.
Lee says it’s too early to make a bet on form factors either way,
since people don’t always have their phones on their bodies, and
wearables have the advantage of sensors that could, increasingly, measure
things like heartbeat and sweat content at all times.
“The amount of data you have available to you is going to
grow exponentially,” he adds. “What’s exciting is what you can do with that
data in the future.”
Over time, Lee hopes to find a spot for his service in the
healthcare space. Fitness apps and wearable devices generally fit into the
so-called consumerization of health care trend, where services hope to take a
bite out of the $2.3 trillion health care industry and pay a role in that long
span of time between doctor’s visits.
Lee sees his service as an “incredibly powerful” way to bridge the
data gap between consumers and their health care providers. A future service
that ties in with healthcare “would have to be permission based,” he adds,
but such features are already being mapped out and MyFitnessPal has
an API that allows users to connect to certain healthcare providers. “We’d be
interested in adding a medical partner,” he says.
That could be one potential route to making money. For now,
MyFitnessPal derives revenue entirely from selling ad space on its app with the
help of mobile ad networks. The startup, which was bootstrapped for most of its
life until an $18 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins last
year, was actually profitable for a while, Lee says. However investments in
hiring for roles like data science to boost its analytics
offerings, have pushed it into the red more recently.
Lee started MyFitnessPal nine years ago as a desktop app when he
and his then-fiancee were trying to shed a few pounds ahead of their beach
wedding. When his trainer told him to start counting his calories on paper, Lee
created a web application that allowed him to do it on a computer instead. The
service became an iPhone app in early 2009.
Today it’s one of several free, weight-loss apps that have
challenged paid-for dieting stalwarts like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers,
both of whom have suffered share drops over the last year or so as a
result.
Many of these free apps, like MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper and
Runtastic, cross reference data with one another via open APIs to help them
scale up. Over time though, some may choose to stop sharing data in a bid to
create single platforms that users go to for a holistic view of their health
and activity. This seems to be the road MyFitnessPal is going down with its
private API and now, the inclusion of steps tracking.
The app’s announcement is also interestingly timed, coming a day
afterFacebook unveiled the new behind-the-scenes network that connects
mobile apps via a user’s Facebook ID. With it, users will soon be able to
log into apps “anonymously.”
The idea is that this will encourage more people to use
Facebook as an identifier between third-party services.
For an app like MyFitnessPal which may eventually
partner up with healthcare providers, a ubiquitous ID system like Facebook’s
could make that easier. But Facebook and MyFitnessPal will need to gain scale,
and more importantly the trust, of users to take that next step.
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