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Life insurance company John Hancock recently caused a sensation by announcing that all its policies would now be associated with the option allowing the company to track your fitness – via a website and an application, or by using a tracker of fitness like Apple Watch or Fitbit.
This decision underscores the extent to which fitness monitoring data is still a largely untapped gold mine for businesses – particularly in sectors such as insurance, whose financial results directly depend on the health of their customers. . John Hancock does not hesitate to say this: "The longer people live, the more money we make," said Brooks Tingle, the company's CEO, at the New York Times.
However, published research on Fitbits and similar devices has not yet revealed a clear link between fitness monitoring and fitness, let alone longevity and mortality, or corporate profits. d & # 39; insurance. However, there is strong evidence that while device use is associated with incentives such as rewards, challenges and league tables ("read," so to speak in the social sciences), the health benefits can be real . It is therefore probably not a coincidence that John Hancock's policies rely heavily on this type of incentive.
The big question: will potential insurance customers buy it?
Since fitness trackers are attached to your body, they are able to provide a real-time fire hose on the most intimate aspects of your existence – where you go, when you sleep, how much you weigh, to what speed your heart beats, and so on. Athletes and those interested in maintaining or increasing their fitness are naturally interested in this data, and the numbers are fun to follow in time for anyone who is even interested in what makes their bodies vibrate.
Devices like the Fitbit are based on the idea that tracking these numbers is the first step toward their improvement: "Know to improve," as the home page of l & # 39; company. But researchers who have studied how these devices are actually used in the real world have found that it was not so simple.
A randomized controlled trial based in Singapore, one of the largest studies of fitness trackers conducted to date, revealed in 2016 "no evidence of improvement in health outcomes" compared to a control group. A similar study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2016 found that among the 470 overweight youth, those randomly assigned to a fitness tracker actually lost a little less weight over a two-year period.
These studies have some caveats, including the fact that trials were conducted between 2010 and 2014, using first-generation fitness tracking systems that lacked many of the bells and whistles of current models. The latest models include a series of incentives designed to encourage users to use their devices more, which increases their level of activity.
Fitbit, for example, offers badges for achievements such as walking 20,000 steps in a day or climbing the equivalent of 100 floors. They have league tables, where users can compete with their friends, family and strangers to see who can make the most marches or miles in a day or a month. The devices can be configured to remind users to a few hundred goal steps on a given day.
Interventions like these may seem clumsy and puerile, but research has shown that they work. A study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Heart Association, for example, found that among sedentary employees, the Fitbits used in conjunction with the boards and challenges were more effective for workers than Fitbits alone . . A separate study published this year in JAMA Internal Medicine found that people who use a service that modifies their Fitbits, offering them points to reach their goals and leveling up with improved fitness, reach their daily goals significantly more often than users do not have such items.
John Hancock's new insurance program, which he calls Vitality, incorporates many of these elements. The most important is: the more active the assets are, the lower their insurance premiums, up to 15% savings on the cost of annual premiums or $ 300 per year for a life insurance policyholder typical temporary. Other rewards for fitness goals include Amazon gift cards and retail discounts, as well as massive discounts on Apple watches.
There are of course confidentiality issues when you grant a third party access to your data, especially medical data. And it is to be feared that in the long run, people who are not inclined to share fitness data may face difficulties such as higher rates or even being cut off completely from coverage. # 39; insurance. These latter concerns have in part prompted the state of West Virginia to abandon a plan that would have required state employees to wear fitness trackers or to incur a higher premium and deductible penalty.
Part of these concerns may simply be a function of semantics – the John Hancock plan is presented as a benefit to those who opt for follow-up, while the West Virginia plan penalizes those who chose not to participate . In terms of corporate profits and consumer portfolios, there may not be much difference between the two approaches. And in terms of confidentiality, insurers already have a mountain of data about you: your name, address, social security number, payment information and, in many cases, your medical records, just to name a few. those.
In the long run, consumers wishing to share their fitness data with insurers could gain real benefits, especially if the practice extends to health insurance providers, as seems inevitable at this stage. People who follow their fitness can find themselves in better health and benefit from cheaper insurance than those who do not have one. Insurance companies can make more money with a healthier clientele.
It's a win-win for everyone, with the exception of people who decide not to share their fitness data with their insurers.
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