The Future of Wearables is More than Devices

In its February trends snapshot, Blueshift Research found that 40% of Americans made no change over the last six months when it came to living habits such as diet, exercise, sleep etc., up six points from a year ago.

The “no change” group is where I was over the last several decades despite periodically committing to do better.

Unfortunately, nearly 17% responded to the survey that their living habits had actually worsened, 3.1% significantly so over the six month span since this trend was last measured.

The good news is that during that same span 43% of us felt they had improved their living habits, 7% significantly.  A 2008 study calculated that “inactivity” costs the U.S. $76 billion in healthcare spending.

So I often wonder what finally made me shift gears 19 months ago after years of resolutions and wasted gym memberships.

Was it finally finding a spiritual connection while walking each morning?

Was it having a significant other to do that with, which has been expanded to include weight conditioning twice a week?

Was it using a fitness tracker and a linked app to track the caloric content of various foods I was eating?

Was it being confronted by a tiny belly roll when a portrait was hung to honor three of us just before I retired?

Was it that first sign of a film like build up in one of my carotid arteries?

Intrigued, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer what made me finally get serious.

It is not as though my doctor hadn’t been cautionary for several years about normalizing the level of triglycerides levels in my blood.

I always see the waiting room at the clinic where I get annual physicals full of people who are in much worse shape than I was and seemingly oblivious to the inappropriateness of yoga pants or having to lean over to see their shoes..

Medicare is now going to start holding doctors accountable for patient changes by calibrating what they are paid to outcomes.  But I am not sure how much more they can do to cajole each of us into accepting personal responsibility for our health.

Two years ago, a Pew Study found that 45% of U.S. adults are dealing with at least one chronic health condition but 7-in-10 overall keep track of a health indicator including 19% who have no chronic conditions.

But only a fifth use technological devices such as wearables with nearly half doing so only in their head.

Last year’s report by Endeavor Partners found that 1-in-10 adult Americans owned a fitness tracker, 1-in-4 between the ages of 25 and 34.  Unfortunately, more than half no longer use it and a third stopped using it within six months.

Key for sustainable use, according to the report, are 3 behavioral factors: habit formation, social motivation and goal reinforcement along with 6 other factors such as utility, design, fit, out of the box experience etc.

Fitbit, the one I have used since early 2010 when it came out, appeared to score highest overall among the eight different fitness “wearables” measured in the report.

Juniper Research projects that use of fitness devices and wearables will triple by 2018.  Some analysts project these devices will reach 48% market penetration worldwide by then.

A new Pew study shows that 64% of Americans now own Smartphones, double the proportion from just four years ago.  Smartphones have also rapidly become the means by which low income and disadvantaged Americans go online.

More than 60% of Smartphone owners use their phones to get health information, 57% to do online banking, 43% to look up job information and 30% to take a class or get educational content.

Making outdoor billboard advertising even more obsolete, more than 67% of smartphone owners use their phone for turn-by-turn navigation while driving, 32% do so frequently, compared to less than 1% of Americans who still rely on a billboard.

But wearables such as those for fitness and health are set to make “interruption” advertising such as billboards even more obsolete, according to PwC.

They will accelerate even faster the rapid transition to interest-based, content marketing but only when relevant and needed now.

Studies have shown that the three-decade decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising has reached a negative return on investment overall.

Fitness and wellness apps are on track to more than sextuple by next year from what they were in 2010.  But a report issued last year by PwC shows plenty of reasons that businesses and organizations will soon get involved, too.

Already, 70% of consumers “say they would wear employer-provided wearable devices streaming anonymous data to a pool in exchange for a break on their insurance premiums” something that will obviously catch the attention of insurers in Obamacare exchanges.

The World Health Organization recommends that people get 30 active minutes a day.  A premium feature of the device I wear shows on a bell curve where I fall compared to men my age and weight as well as other demographics overall.

Telling is that at 30 “very” active minutes on average per day, I am in the 89th percentile for my group, or over 185% of the median. For many weeks I average over 40, over 300% of the median.

This means that, unfortunately, I am in the top 11% and regularly in the top 3%.

The center of that bell curve is only 6 “very” active minutes.  Even scarier is that I am 400% over the median for many of those people waiting in my doctor’s office.

People are nearly twice as likely to purchase and use fitness bands and smart watches if employers pay for them.  But the future of wearables goes beyond fitness.

More than half of the adults in the survey agree that automated facial recognition will replace the need to remember names, 56% say life expectancy will increase an average of 10 years and 46% believe wearables will decrease obesity.

But wearables, even for fitness, are rapidly moving beyond devices.  A report yesterday by KUED notedthat consumers are already moving to biometric clothing such as Hexoskin which report metrics beyond those done by devices.

Another by Athos is designed to help with weight and flexibility training.  Analysts project that sales of fitness device wearables will soon plateau or go down due to the overlap between smart wristbands and smart or sports watches.

But sales of smart garments such as Athos are projected to grow to 26 million units next year, up 2,600 times what they were in 2013 and more than two and a half times what they will be this year.

It will be interesting to see if they have a sustained impact on the overall health outcomes for Americans.

Three Reasons Anecdotes Often Distort Reports

Probably as an attempt to make an already interesting chart in a report I read last week seem even more interesting, someone penciled in the names of a few events.

The notations seemed to suggest anecdotal explanations for a change over last year in passenger growth at the airport jointly owned by Durham, North Carolina, the community where I live.

This is often done in reports made for general consumption either through a lack of understanding of data analysis, or as I will show later, due to the discomfort human beings have with randomness.

Some of the notations in the airport’s report made sense, such as when a significant number of flights were cancelled over the course of several days due to bad weather.

Some made less sense such as when a few direct west coast flights were added.

And notations attributing increases to community events made no sense at all.

While the events were significant to the communities where they were held and surely filled some airline seats, it is questionable that they were each the reason for a bump in traffic for two months.

If they were, the increase in those months would be reflected by a drop in the month following.  Instead the percentage of increase continued without the events.

An “inconvenient truth” for communities hosting the Super Bowl, the mother of all mega-events, is that sales tax collected across those dates varies little from the year prior and the year after.

There are at least three reasons mistakes such as these occur.

Often it is deliberately done as a community relations gesture to please a few stakeholders or even more often, to help justify the hyperbole they have generated around an event. 

Humorously, one community event proclaimed one year that airlines would add flights due to an event to be held shortly after a new terminal was set to open.

The news media is complicit in this hyperbole or else a follow up story would have noted that neither the number of flights nor passenger load factors increased, signaling that the event may have created displacement which would have also lessened its overall economic impact.

Seth Godin recently wrote, “Human-beings are story-making engines, and when we’re confronted with randomness, we make up an egocentric version of what happened and it involves us.”

Applicable to the explanations penciled on that chart I read, he continues with, “Here’s the truth.  There is no reason.  That’s why we define it as random.”

More on randomness as it involves analysis of data later.

I saw the fascination people have with anecdotes during some of my board meetings in my former life in community destination marketing.

Often after seeing a change in a metric that had been generated such as aggregating and comparing hotel occupancies community-wide, a member, seeking an anecdote-fix, would inevitably turn to another who operated a hotel and ask “Is that what you saw?”

Others would leap to conclusions that it was due to a major event,  even though it would take an event many times larger or a phenomenal increase in events overall that month to move that particular needle, and by doing so, would create displacement.

Of course, even in communities that also had access to this data, a community-destination organization (DMO) may be complicit if it is one of those places that subsidizes events to be held there.

Even where they should know better, this can often happen because organizations in a community want to please those excited by the event, but more often it is because they are careless with data analysis or just want to sell sponsorships.

This has happened in the last few weeks as communities hosted NCAA basketball playoff games across the country.  Often, to calculate impact, they would factor in hotels rooms used without deducting for the percentage that would have been filled anyway.

Or they would extrapolate spending estimates without factoring in the number of day-trip vs. overnight attendees and/or without factoring attrition as teams lost and fans returned home when it was too late to retrieve visitors who had been displaced by the event.

Communities are often guilty of grossing up estimates without netting out displacement and leakage when displacement pushes the impact off into nearby communities, or worse, crowds out the flow of air travelers who would have visited those communities for other purposes.

News reporters become enablers either out of enthusiasm for events or because they do not understand the nature of economic impact, unwittingly misleading officials in other communities to go down the same path without rationale based on good analytics.

The reason misattribution of impact occurs involves data analysis itself.  A white paper entitled “The 5 Common Mistakes People Make In the Name of Statistical Analysis,” is available from Mu Sigma, one of the world’s largest decision sciences and analytics firms.

One is “extracting meaning out of randomness.”  Data analysis is the process of looking for meaningful patterns.  This process involves isolating patterns from “noise” which in statistics refers to a “random phenomena” that is “beyond the control of your organization or even known external factors.”

So the penciling on that chart might be a case of what data analysts call the “Problem of Overfitting.”

This is just one observation from an otherwise excellent report that if harvested by any of the five dozen destination communities pushing and pulling traffic through the airport will be immensely valuable, especially to community-destination marketing organizations.

More than half of the airport enplanements are visitor-related.  The report breaks down the top market areas for 2014 including 610 passengers daily via the airport in Boston, 590 via New York-LaGuardia and another 330 via New York-Kennedy.

Those new flights to LA and San Francisco added to non-direct flights carried 594, probably not enough to make a dent where penciled in as the reason for a bump in numbers overall a year ago.

More than 9.5 million passengers transit through RDU International Airport during the course of a year.  That’s about 26,000 a day, 13,000 of whom are visitors either arriving or returning home.

Even for Durham which draws 33% of the visitors who arrive via RDU, a greater proportion than any other city and the equal of Wake County which includes Raleigh, air travelers represent only 8% of visitors traveling from at least 50 miles away, a point shy of the national average and double that of North Carolina.

But from the time I took my first International flight in 1967 as a college kid and when I retired in 2009 after a four-decade career in community destination marketing, the metric for passenger revenue miles worldwide has increased by 18 times.

But the metric for global air cargo miles had increased by more than 22 times.

Of just as much significance to North Carolina's brand though is that RDU represents 5,000 acres, including impeccably maintained natural areas along roadways maintains.

But half is open space unusable for any future aviation needs.

There will be incredible pressure, unfortunately some of it created by airport stewards, to convert much of that land from open space, trees, streams and park-like land into development and impervious surface instead.

Hopefully, any thinking in that direction will factor in the ecosystem services provided by that open space, giving as much consideration for green infrastructure as tarmac.

Very few cities encompass an airport.  Instead, most airports, such as RDU are surrounded by numerous, distinct cities.

The surrounding cities draw travelers through the airport doubling the size justified by their collective populations.  But on average, airports also distribute a third of the value of all of the products we consume.

RDU is at the center of an Aerotropolis, a term coined by Dr. John Kasarda who heads the Center for Air Commerce at UNC-Chapel Hill.

As such, RDU is well advised to remember that it is also the town square for this vast, multi-city Aerotropolis

The Inverse Drop In Questions

It is of great concern to educators that the percentage of students who ask questions during plummets from near 100% when they are 2 years of age to only 25% by the time they are 18 and finishing high school.

It is the inverse of the percentage who gain the ability to read and write during those years and parallels the decline in the number of students who are engaged in learning.

It isn’t coincidence that it also parallels engagement in the American workforce, including those in management and policy-making.

Somewhere in that decline, the majority of Americans lose their ability to be creative and innovative because they focus almost solely on answers rather than asking questions.

Sometimes it is cultural.  In the South, where I have lived for 26 years now, it seems that questions are often interpreted as criticism.  From there it is only a short hop to avoiding crucial confrontations and/or conversations.

Polluting the process even more in the workplace is the tendency of some people to make statements that should be in the form of questions.

Or another gimmick is to appear to be asking a question at a public gathering, but in essence, doing so only to toot your own horn or score brownie points.

The Right Question Institute is working to help educators focus on teaching how to inquire rather than just memorizing answers.

This includes publishing a primer entitled, Make Just One Change.

For the workplace, an excellent article just appeared in Harvard Business Review entitled, Relearning the Art of Asking Questions.

This could also be used to help teach how to ask questions in the workplace or among stakeholders in community endeavors, even on List Serves.

The authors, who work for Mu Sigma, provide a model for asking better questions as well as taking them in stride.  In my experience, I agree that far too many meetings fail because people “talk past each other.”

The model divides questions into those seeking a wider view of the issue under discussion vs. those that seek to narrow or deepen the discussion.  In both instances, there are questions meant to affirm what we know and those meant to discover something new.

Questions are divided into those that are adjoining or elevating to the topic at hand (think strategic) and those that are clarifying or seek to drill down deeper into the topic.

With some of the groups with which I am involved in retirement, it would probably be useful if we each prefaced our questions using with one of these four purposes (smile) or places a notation on the agenda signifying which kind of questions are in order.

Questions are not criticism or challenges.  They are gateways to learning, enlightenment, alignment, creativity and innovation.

They are as important to adults as they were when we asked an average of 40,000 questions between the age of 3 and 5.

Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

The Unintended Consequences of A Policy Change

I was just turning 40 when the issue over smoking on airline flights reached a tipping point and then banned in the U.S. in November of 1989, six months after we jumpstarted the community destination marketing for Durham, North Carolina.

So until recently, I assumed the continued presence of ashtrays on the doors of airliner lavatories merely dated the age of the aircraft.

But federal law, while prohibiting smoking inflight, including the levy of stiff fines for lighting up in the “john,” still requires the installation of ashtrays there on new aircraft as a safety precaution.

Far too often though, prohibitions such as smoking bans fail to include careful consideration of unintended, but costly consequences.

In mid-2012 Durham, NC, where I live, enacted what at the time was the most comprehensive smoking ban in North Carolina and possibly the Southeast.  Soon, workers quickly removed all ashtrays for cigarette butts from the bus stops.

The logic was that leaving them in place would encourage smoking but instead, taking them away has resulted in these areas being littered with butts.  But studies show that merely leaving these receptacles in place may have had little impact.

In 2008, a study was conducted, in part, to observe how smokers dispose of cigarette and cigar butts.  Only 15% used the ashtray while 40 flicked them on the ground including into shrubs while 27% left the site with the butt in hand.

During intercepts, self-reported litterers reported the greatest likelihood of littering occurring with cigarette butts.

Even more telling, smokers were also nearly twice as likely overall to litter as non-smokers, even when cigarette butts were excluded from the measure.

One wonders why anti-littering campaigns have failed to use this information to better target efforts just as agencies have learned to use animal abuse around a home as an indication that domestic abuse is likely there too?

Cities began to ban smoking on public transportation in 1936, more than three decades after several states had tried to do so and while tobacco companies were busy advertising how good smoking was for your teeth.

At the time, according to advertising research conducted for Fortune Magazine, 53% of adult American males including 66% of those under 40 smoked.

As of three months ago, according to the Blueshift Research Trends Tracker, 84.3% of Americans don’t smoke including 55% who have never smoked according to the CDC.

Of the 15% who do (13.4% daily,) 53% smoke cigarettes and 26% smoke cigars, yet tobacco products represent 38% of all litter along roadways, 23% of which comes from pedestrians.

It is only one of the ways smokers still shift billions of dollars of costs off onto those who don’t.

About 29 of every 100 adults who live below the poverty level are smokers, a rate much higher than those not in poverty.

The rate is also much higher among those who are disabled or work limited as it also is for LGBT Americans.

Recent studies show that smoking is increasing within poorer neighborhoods while it is disappearing in affluent neighborhoods.  report on CNN a year ago noted that “the chronic stress of poverty drives unhealthy behaviors.”

Societal stress may be the reason higher rates of smoking are also found in the other groups as well.

Based on the findings of the behavioral analysis of litterers, researchers have begun to look closely at the links between depression, smoking and littering in poor neighborhoods.

The 4% of litterers who admit doing it on purpose say it was just because they were having a bad day.

Depression, according to experts, is not about feeling sad or mad as much as it is about not caring anymore; a lack of vitality.

Its association with poverty is also why so-called sin-taxes to discourage smoking and lower its burden on those who don’t, may be too blunt an instrument to root it out entirely.

There also appears to be a direct link between cigarette smuggling and the level of taxation on cigarettes purchases, up to half of all cigarettes consumed in some states.

Banning tobacco makes sense, but it makes equally good sense to examine whether removing ashtrays or leaving smokers no options such as in airports yields hidden costs such as litter.

This may be why in Utah, where resident smokers are now only 9 out of 100 adults, there are special, high exhaust chambers in the Salt Lake Airport, intended for visitors as well as residents and paid for, in part, by a reduction in litter and illegal smoking elsewhere.

All of this is to say that bans on products such as smoking require thoughtful execution.