Bias in Product Innovation: Fitness Trackers

Bias in any research and development effort can have serious repercussions and can be a major roadblock to innovation.

4 min readMar 15, 2021

--

The COVID-19 pandemic has revived the need for a focus on health and personal wellbeing. We are currently witnessing a growth in the number of people using fitness apps and devices to keep track of their activities and monitor their fitness levels.

This heightened sense of awareness about staying fit and healthy is driving sales for smartwatches and fitness tracking watches. The market size stood at USD 30.41 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach USD 91.98 billion by 2027.

A few other reasons, other than the pandemic, that have the potential to influence people to start tracking their activities are:

The UK government’s recent policy that targets obesity. “The Department of Health and Social Care is giving the NHS and local councils in England £70m to pay for up to 700,000 overweight or obese people to go on weight management courses, such as those provided by Weight Watchers or Slimming World, or work with a personal coach to help them shed unwanted pounds.”
The Indian government launched the Fit India Movement in 2019 to encourage people to remain healthy and fit by including physical activities and sports in their daily lives.

These are to name a few. As the demand for fitness trackers grows, the device manufacturers are also going the extra mile to add more product innovations and improving their product offerings. In modern tracking devices, you can get features like listening to music on-the-go, monitor your activity stats, and later do a deep-dive as well, respond to calls/emails via your smartwatch and even pay for your morning coffee. (Read the case: https://www.garmin.com/en-US/blog/general/pay-for-coffee-on-the-run/)

A majority of these smart watches/fitness trackers use a green light that is placed on the back of the watch to track the heart rate of the user. The mechanism works in the following manner; by flashing the LED lights hundreds of times per second, these devices can calculate the number of times the heart beats each minute, thus projecting the heart rate at different stages during the activity. This feature is of utter importance for athletes, but not just limited to them. People starting out their fitness regimen and engaging in high-intensity interval training (HIIT) or intense cardiovascular activity, need to keep their heartbeat rate in check to avoid a strain to the heart. So, heartbeat tracking needs to be effective and accurate. With all the features offered by these watches, there is a major flaw that has been lurking under the surface, even as more players enter the smartwatch market.

Scientifically, green light has a shorter wavelength and is more easily absorbed by melanin, a natural skin pigment that is more prevalent in people with darker skin. This makes people with darker skin get inaccurate data from their fitness device. This may impact the performance or may impact the fitness regimen of users. While hospitals use an infrared tracking mechanism, which is way more expensive than green lights. Simply put, organizations use green lights as they are simpler and cheaper to use.

When this problem was brought to light, many device manufacturers suggested that they are using an intense variant of green light that penetrates the skin and is able to justify the stats, while some suggested that they are using other mechanisms, other than just the green light, to track and ensure the accuracy of the heart rate.

This problem is not just limited to inaccurate tracking through a green light, it goes deeper than that and makes you ask a question, why didn’t this problem surface at the time of product testing? That is because most of the testing is done with a light-skinned audience and since it is accurate for them, it is produced based on those results.

So, what is the key takeaway from this piece? Is it just the insight about how fitness trackers work? My suggestion to brands is to be more inclusive while testing the products. We all have recently been following the news and updates on how intense and phase-wise the vaccines were tested. More than phase-wise, the tests were done on a myriad of audiences. Similarly, product testing must be given the time and tried on different audiences (on different parameters). This may, for obvious reasons, vary depending on the nature of the product.

The green light is prevalent in all major brands: Apple, Garmin, Fitbit, and Samsung to name a few.

Some Sources for Reference/Further Reading:

Bias in Product Innovation: Fitness Trackers

Bias in any research and development effort can have serious repercussions and can be a major roadblock to innovation.

Written by Rajat Pande