Microsoft Joins Battle for Wearables Market

Following the lead of several other companies big and small, Microsoft has jumped into the wearables healthcare market with a watch, a fitness tracker and a cloud-based platform that condenses and shares data.

It’s little wonder. After a few years of uncertainty, it seems pretty clear that the wearables market is taking off like a rocket. In fact, 21% of US consumers own such a device, according to research by PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s slightly higher that the number of consumers who bought tablets during the first two years after they launched, PwC reports. Not only Microsoft, but Apple and Samsung, as well as smaller players with a high profile — such as Fitbit — are poised to take the sector by storm.

Microsoft’s new entry is called Microsoft Health, a platform letting users store health and fitness data. The date in question is collected by a Microsoft Health app, available on Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The platform also gathers data generated from the Microsoft Band, a smart and designed to work with Microsoft’s new platform.

The idea behind pulling all of this data into a single platform is to integrate data from different devices and services in a smart way that allows consumers to generate insights into their health. The next step for Microsoft Health, execs say, is to connect all of that data in the platform to the tech giant’s HealthVault, a Web-based PHR, making it easier for people to share data with their healthcare providers.

Other tech giants are making their own wearables plays, of course. Google, for example, has released Google Fit, a fitness-based app designed to help users track physical activity. Google’s approach is  Android smart phones, relying on sensors built into the smart phones to detect if the user is walking, running or biking. Users can also connect to devices and apps like Noom Coach and Withings.

Apple, for its part, has launched HealthKit, its competing platform for collecting data from various health and fitness apps.  The data can then be accessed easily by Apple users through the company’s Health app (which comes installed on the iPhone 6.) HealthKit is designed to send data directly to hospital and doctor charts as well. It also plans to launch a smart watch early next year.

While there’s little doubt consumers are interested in the wearables themselves, it’s still not clear how enthusiastic they are about pulling all of their activity onto a single platform. Providers might be more excited about taming this gusher of data, which has proved pretty intimidating to doctors already overwhelmed with standard EMR information, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll find fitness information to be helpful.

All told, it looks like there will be a rollicking battle for the hearts and minds of wearables consumers, as well as the loyalty of providers.  As for me, I think it will be a year or two, at minimum, before we get a real sense of what consumers and providers really want from these devices.