Actionable Data (Premium)

The original Microsoft Band was a unique and powerful wearable in its day, and it was bristling with sensors at a time when fitness trackers were basic and Apple Watch didn't even exist yet. But one of its key differentiators wasn't health or fitness related: it could also integrate with Outlook, and it could provide notifications for things like email, appointments, and other calendar events, plus Facebook and other social networking notifications, text messages, and phone calls.

I found that functionality annoying in use, but I suspect many Band early adopters loved it, and we know now that it was a peek at the future of more pervasive wearables in which we now live. But it was the promise of Microsoft Band that got me hooked: as Microsoft explained to me, the Band's knowledge of your health and fitness data and your work schedule would lead to improvements in which it could use machine learning to present what it called "actionable" information to its users that would be based on both sets of data.

I found one example I was given to be particularly intriguing. Perhaps a future Band version would notice over time that your heart rate always went up in the half hour before your weekly Monday meeting. And so it would recommend activities like yoga or meditation that might help. And then it could monitor the situation over time to make sure that what they did helped.

This dream was never realized, of course. After an improved Band 2 release a year later in 2015, Microsoft canceled a third version and gave up on the product and the Microsoft Health service that backed it. As I noted in a later post-mortem, both Band versions had their share of missing features and issues, but it is particularly galling that the device never offered proactive functionality like prompting you to stand up or move around, an obvious first step towards that actionable information promise. Microsoft's promises for Band, alas, were nothing more than science fiction.

Flash forward 8 years and a lot has changed. After a disastrous launch as a luxury accessory for well-off Apple fans, the Apple Watch was reimagined as a health and fitness wearable and now dominates this market. After renaming and redesigning Android Wear several times, Google finally just purchased Fitbit, the market leader in fitness trackers, and then belatedly shipped its first in-house Apple Watch competitor in late 2022. And these companies, plus Samsung, Garmin, and many others long ago caught up to and surpassed the number of useful data-gathering sensors that Microsoft had first pioneered with the Band. The health and fitness industry was worth over $30 billion by the end of 2022, and the smart health and fitness part of that accounted for over $13 billion of the total.

I have been deeply involved with this market and the various products and services that define it probably from the beginning. And I've spent innumerable hours reading books and watching documentaries in an effor...