Now Fitbit has come full (activity) circle, and is being bought by one of the largest software companies in the world. Google says it is acquiring Fitbit to bring together “the best AI, software and hardware” in order to “spur innovation in wearables and build products to benefit even more people around the world.” It complements Google’s vision for “ambient computing,” as my WIRED colleague Louise Matsakis points out ; gives it more technological armor to compete with Apple Watch; and could help Google do deeper in the healthcare market.
Although Fitbit’s position in wearables has weakened over the past three years, it was for a long time the clear leader in activity-tracking wearables. It opened the floodgates for a decade of innovation around Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-connected wrist dongles, ones packed with sensors, displays, and batteries that got better each year. But things quickly grew weird in wearable land. Many wearable startups didn’t make it, while others, like Fitbit, got bought by Big Tech.But now that giant tech corporations are fully invested in health trackers—Apple, Xiaomi, and Huawei held the lead in the global wearables market as of the second quarter of this year—the future remains uncertain for smaller players who are still trying to have an impact. And, even though there’s a chance that Google’s plan to buy Fitbit may not pass muster with regulators, it is possible that there might even be some upside to having massive tech companies become the central repositories for our daily health stats.
Back in TimeNot long after Fitbit launched its first tracker in 2009, the private company Jawbone, which was already a successful maker of audio products, pivoted to wearables. The company’s first wristband, called the Jawbone Up , actually plugged into a phone’s 3.5mm headphone jack to sync the band’s data (back when phones actually had headphone jacks). A year after that, in 2012, Nike launched FuelBand , another polymer wristband that was supposed to motivate its wearers, in this case through a proprietary—and seemingly arbitrary—metric labeled “Fuel.”
Others soon crowded the space. In late 2012, a company called Basis Science launched the B1 body monitor , which stood out because of its optical heart rate sensors, something the earlier wristbands didn’t include. A Bay Area startup called Lark shipped the Larklife band , which tracked both daytime activity and nighttime sleep and was so clunky that one of my editors at the time referred to it as a celibacy band. A Canadian company called Mio Global launched the Mio Link in early 2014, a device that was recognized as one of the first fitness trackers that transmitted continuous heart rate readings. A company called Misfit even had a low-powered wearable that ran on coin-cell batteries never needed to be plugged in.
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