Why Fitbit’s Troubles Could Give Payments Peeps Pause

Fitbit is not having the best imaginable week. The good news about that is that there are very few players who might view last week as one of the best imaginable weeks ever. The Chinese economy is a mess, as a result, the global stock markets are by and large a mess, and a discomforting swath of America’s better known physical retail brands had the pleasure of telling their investors that America’s consumers class had collectively given them a lump of coal in their physical stockings hung by their physical fireplaces this holiday season.  

So if one was going to have a bad week, the first full business week of the New Year was not a bad time to do it, since misery does love company, as they say.   

But back to Fitbit.

Some of Fitbit’s troubles were consistent with the bad news that everyone else was trying to absorb. It took a beating on its share price, with a single day loss of 18 percent on Tuesday. At the time this article was written, however, Fitbit’s stock price was picking up slightly, as the market in the U.S. is trying to recover from its earlier losses.

But the other part of Fitbit’s headaches this week were possibly a bit more troubling, if not quite as publicly visible as the share price slide.  

The nation’s premier wearable maker is being sued by customers alleging that the product just doesn’t work. Despite the product’s claims of being able to record and communicate health-related data like heart rate, the three consumers involved in the suit say that when put to the test, Fitbit just isn’t that good at measuring vital stats, especially when someone is exercising intensely. Yes, it doesn’t take much to get the litigation wheels in motion in the U.S.

And while Fitbit is in the legal hot seat today, no doubt there are others wearables makers quaking in their sensor-enabled boots. Wearables, as a class so far, have been all about helping consumers channel their inner fitness and health guru, using smart measurement tech to meet their fitness and health goals. In fact, when the put through its paces, the Apple Watch runs into many of the same issues since it leverages similar technology in the fitness tracking aspect of their app.   

Narrowly, the issue highlights one of the key potential problems with wearables, and the difficulty of using miniaturized technology that doesn’t suck up a lot of battery to deliver precisely accurate results.

Broadly, it raises some interesting questions about other biometric tech that are used for slightly more serious purposes than designing a workout with optimal caloric burn.  

Why Some Consumers Are Failing Fitbit

Fitbit’s narrow issues with all three of those customers in Wisconsin and California is that the heart rate tracking in the Charge HR and the Surge (two of the newer models to the line) are inaccurate by a “significant margin.”  

The monitors do not “count every beat” as advertised and when an individual is in the middle of a strenuous exercise, it is allegedly quite inaccurate, which these three consumers claim defeats the point of owning it.

One consumer notes in the suit that her Fitbit calculated her heart rate to be an 82, even though a professional who manually took her pulse at the same time came up with a heart rate of 160. The suit also alleges that when tested by a cardiologist using an electrocardiogram machine to compare results, Fitbit’s heart rate sensor repeatedly offered inaccurate readings, too – and especially when heart rates were at 110 bpm or higher.  

Overall, the suit alleges the Fitbit is off 24.34 bpm on average. However, when customers tried to return it on those grounds, Fitbit refused to refund the purchases.  

Fitbit isn’t the only wearable fitness tracker that has been the subject of these complaints.  

In an extensive test drive, tech bloggers have gotten extremely similar results from an Apple device. During periods of intense exercise, the exact same issue surfaces. The watch seemed to do fine until the user’s heart rate exceeded 112 bpm, at which point it suddenly and inexplicably drops off. (The writer reported their exercise intensity was totally unchanged for two minutes before jumping back over 100. This difficulty, the author noted, also meant that the watch had difficulty calculating how much time a user spent working out unless they specifically put it into “workout mode,” which has a negative effect on the battery life.    

There seems to be a reason that both products have a similar problem when consumers who use them start to feel the burn, so to speak.  

The Problem With Wearables Is You Are Supposed To Wear Them

Both Apple and Fitbit use a similar technology to measure heart rate: LED lights that monitor blood flow through a user’s wrist. That data is then run through proprietary algorithms which then calculate the user’s probable heart rate.  

Probable being the operative word in that sentence.  

The LED sensors that monitor blood work well, but don’t work continuously. Instead they make measurements at intervals and then predictions about beats per minute, which get more difficult the more quickly the user’s blood is flowing (i.e. the faster that the user’s heart is beating).   

An electrocardiogram, which continuously monitors the heart with extremely calibrated tech, works much better, but does have the downside of being extremely large, complicated and not the sort of thing one could easily wear on one’s wrist. And that’s not even considering the battery one would need to power it.  

The technology on wearable devices on the other hand – is relatively low powered and easy to embed on a small device (like a watch or wristband) but gathers a much thinner stream of data and then combines it with a smart algorithm that extrapolates a reading. The more normal the circumstances, the better it does — but unsurprisingly when the system is stressed (with faster blood flow) it doesn’t work as fast or as well.

And those algorithms apparently still have a bit of learning to do. Apple, with its ability to add an additional data stream to the mix with GPS calibration has gotten a little closer. But the fact remains that the systems either need to make better guesses with the data it can gather, or find ways to gather more data without growing the wearable to be the size of a toaster; that would be tough to accommodate during a workout.

How much that inaccuracy matters remains to be seen. For the three consumers in three states, it clearly matters very much to the extent they are going to court. But it seems so far at least that the vast majority of of smarttech wearers are more in line with one blogger who documented the inaccuracy, but didn’t seem offended by it.

“Fitness trackers are more about motivation than accuracy. If they get you to be more active, by prodding you to reach new goals, then they are successful.”

Bravo.

Some Things Abide A Less Flexible Definition Of Success

Wearables are something of an odd island onto themselves, though the recent difficulty highlights a problem that seems eternal to the products. To make them small enough to be wearable, it is hard to make them robust enough to be useful. The paring-down of complex technology is tough, Moore’s Law aside.  

And though the problem is most pronounced in wearables, payments peeps should perhaps experience a moment of pause and consider how many bio authentication systems run on a similar logic, if not an identical technology platform to wearable fitness trackers.  

When a smartphone scans one’s finger, it combines what is essentially a fairly simple optical scan with an algorithm that tells it that it is “seeing” a real fingerprint instead of an image of a fingerprint. Five years ago, that type of tech could be beaten by a photocopy of a fingerprint — these days it is a lot tougher, but not impossible.  

And though there are evermore advanced systems that can offer more tailored readings — measuring retinal pattern or specific heartbeat rhythms — those systems when it comes to mobile payments have to be able to be small enough that they don’t make a phone into a brick, fast enough that it doesn’t slow a consumer’s usage down and mass-producible enough that putting the technology into the phone doesn’t run the cost into the stratosphere.  

And that is a pretty tall order.  

So while Fitbit’s troubles this week may have passed everyone by in the sea of hard times, they did merit some notice. Because similar complaints might be emerging soon — and if a future version involves a mass break in a bio-authentication system, there will probably be more than three complaints, since most consumers don’t invest in bio locks for motivational purposes.  

Uh oh.