Every big tech company these days seems to have a health tracker, and now that includes Facebook.
Last week, The Information reported that the social networking company is working on a wearable health tracker it’s planning to launch next year. At first glance, it’s unclear why Facebook would invest in a piece of hardware that seems unrelated to its core business. But the company has actually been creeping into the health category for years through a series of projects that haven’t garnered a ton of attention.
There are a few reasons why Facebook might want to get into the wearable business. Health aside, Facebook may be keen to put its apps even closer to consumers, and The Information article indicates the watch will have an emphasis on messaging. A tracker could help boost engagement among Facebook’s billions of users by sending them notifications for messages or other health reminders. It could also jump-start Facebook’s purported ambitions to impact public health.
But Facebook’s data-mining practices make a foray into healthcare controversial. Not only does the company collect an incredible amount of information on its users, but it has also mishandled and failed to protect that data. There is reason to believe that people would not want Facebook to have yet another way to collect data about them. However, it is also true that an incredible number of people use Facebook, giving the platform an opportunity to promote healthier lifestyle choices.
The strongest signal of Facebook’s interest in healthcare was hiring Freddy Abnousi, a Stanford University professor and cardiologist with a background in public health, back in 2016 as the company’s head of health technology. In a 2019 interview with Senator Bill Frist on his podcast Second Opinion, Abnousi explained why he left academia for Facebook. He saw in the social network an opportunity to help shape the social aspects of a person’s life that might lead to better health outcomes.
He gave as an example a 2017 study that provided significant evidence that being socially integrated leads to better health behaviors and a lower risk of developing nonfatal heart attack. It was a 22-year study that compared a person’s health profile with social factors, such as whether they were married, had friends, regularly interacted with their community, or went to church. Essentially, the study took a more refined approach to understanding how the ways in which a person lives affects their health, often referred to as the social determinants of health. Typically, health experts think about social determinants of health in terms of a person’s race, where they live, whether they have access to transportation or public parks, and their proximity to healthy food.
But Abnousi saw an opportunity in Facebook to affect individual health behaviors through social interaction and connection to a community. “There has to be this concept of social biomarkers that are indicative over a long period of time of health and disease. And so perhaps we can use that to understand and impact health,” Abnousi said in his interview with Frist.
