Fitbit expands enterprise ambitions with Google Cloud-powered software platform

It’s been almost two years since Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, but in late September the companies dropped one of their first crossover episodes: Device Connect for Fitbit.

Fitbit might be a consumer-device powerhouse—the vast majority of its revenue has historically come from selling its wearables—but Device Connect represents an expansion of Health Solutions, its enterprise-focused business. The new service is targeted at healthcare professionals and organizations looking for “accelerated analytics and insights” into patients and customers. Individual users will “have control over what data they share” with medical companies, physicians, and hospitals, and how it is used.

Device Connect could be a powerful tool not only for patients and physicians, but also for Google and Fitbit as it relates to efforts to gain an edge in the highly competitive wearables space, according to Ramon Llamas, research director for mobile devices and AR/VR at IDC. But success in the enterprise market will likely depend on the economics of Device Connect itself, he said.

“We’re talking about devices that are going to, on average, cost around $200. They’re not cheap. And once you scale that out to numbers of people, that’s a lot of patients,” Llamas told Emerging Tech Brew.

Fitbit stopped breaking out revenue for Health Solutions after the Google acquisition, but in its last pre-acquisition quarterly filing, in Q3 2020, the division was equal to about 8% of total revenue in the first three quarters of that year. Fitbit's total revenue across that period was $813 million.

Amy McDonough, managing director and GM of Fitbit Health Solutions, and Alissa Hsu Lynch, global lead of MedTech strategy and solutions at Google Cloud, both declined to share revenue or customer projections for Device Connect.

How it works

The collaboration is centered around Google Cloud and Fitbit Health Solutions and is designed to reduce the technical work of developing data tools and systems so that medical and life-sciences enterprises can hopefully focus on analyzing data instead of collecting it.

“At its very simplest, what Device Connect for Fitbit does is it actually takes what I would call formerly DIY tools that Fitbit has had, and actually streamlines them, making those easier to implement for very specific populations,” McDonough told Emerging Tech Brew, referring to Fitbit’s suite of developer tools.

Healthcare organizations and professionals will be able to access this data and potentially use it to monitor and provide care to patients outside the doctor’s office. For example, the data could be used to help monitor a patient’s condition before and after surgery, assist with the management of chronic conditions, or utilized as a piece of a larger clinical research study.

“What’s really valuable here with Device Connect is that you can look at data over days, weeks, months, and not even have to come to the office,” Llamas said. “You can have access to more patients more often.”

Device Connect is already in operation at the Haga Teaching Hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, where researchers are using the data to help conduct a study for the early identification and prevention of vascular disease.

Device Connect leverages Google Cloud tech with prebuilt dashboards and includes a patient enrollment and consent app which enables Fitbit data to be accessed by medical professionals and businesses, according to Hsu Lynch. Customers can also use Google’s AI and ML tools to build custom models based on the data, she said.

Ultimately, Hsu said, the goal is to marry the data-collection power of Fitbit with the data-processing power of Google Cloud. 

“One of the challenges in the industry is that there’s no common data standard for health devices,” Hsu Lynch said. “Fitbit brings the patient behaviors and visibility to that more holistic view of the patient, and then Google Cloud brings the analytics tools and the technologies [that] enable the businesses to get the insights from that data.”