Fitbit may have the data-collecting devices, but it’s the wearable company’s partnership with research platform Fitabase that turns that data into something beyond personal activity tracking. Over the last four years, Fitabase has collected over 2 billion minutes of Fitbit data on behalf of their research customers, amassed partnerships with the likes of Johns Hopkins University and MD Anderson Cancer Center, and just hired a new leader of research and development: Ernesto Ramirez, a well-known name in the Quantified Self movement.

It hasn’t exactly been a secret that Fitbit – and many other consumer health tech companies – have been getting increasingly into the healthcare space. And it’s mainly due to the credibility leveraged from the research made possibly by Fitabase.

In short, Fitabase is the data-collection and analysis provider that makes Fitbit more than just a wearable activity tracking company. But the goal wasn’t to be a big name in consumer-focused devices  – the goal from Fitabase was to move health and scientific research forward, which is how the company is now key to Fitbit’s increasingly business-to-business strategy.

“One of the things we see ourselves as is a partner to bring research into the next generation of what it should be,” Ramirez told MobiHealthNews. “There a probably some researchers who would still knock it because it has that consumer veneer on it, but what we are supporting is actually bringing research up to speed to catch up to the [speed and flexibility of the] consumer space.”

Ramirez, a recent Ph.D graduate from University of San Diego’s School of Public Health and former Program Director of Quantified Self, came into Fitabase as a student. Since its partnership with Fitbit in 2012, it has become essential to making meaning out of the data from the company’s myriad devices.

“We’re really the plumbing that makes Fitbit flow,” said Ramirez.

Since Fitabase launched in 2012, the idea has always been to take the tools that people have come to expect on an everyday level into the lab, creating new solutions to the issues historically plaguing researchers – lengthy grant applications, difficulty in recruiting and retaining participants and limited data. On top of that, the measurement tools are less than convenient.

“Looking around health labs and the tools that we have available for objective measure are sensor-based devices that are clunky, expensive and need to be plugged in, “ Fitabase CEO Aaron Coleman told MobiHealthNews. “Then the first little Fitbit came out and the idea popped into my head.”

So Coleman, then a researcher at the Center for Wireless Health and Population Health Systems UC San Diego, moved to San Francisco and met with the vice president of Fitbit, which at the time had just 30 employees.

“I said I thought they would have applications in health research, and asked if this was something they were looking towards,” Coleman said. “They said no.”

Fitbit wanted to focus on its consumer base, offering health and wellness tools without getting too into the weeds with medical data. But, they encouraged Coleman to take on that part himself.

“They said if you want to build this platform, go for it.”
 
So, Fitabase built out a connection to Fitbit’s API, and over the past four years, Coleman has seen Fitbit  as “the most ideal device for us to truly understand different ways to look at health,” since it can offer continuous monitoring for months or even years in ways they never had available.

That deep dive into research represents Fitbit’s increasing focus on business-business strategies, and Fitabase’s increasing focus on Fitbit. At this point, the companies seem inextricable from each other. While Fitabase has over 200 research projects to its credit, Fitbit is its only wearable tracker client.

“Fitbit does a great job of explaining to the individual the broad overview as they strive for their goals,” Coleman said. “What researchers need is a lot and lot of devices, and they need it to be privatized, and they need it in a way that’s more granular than anyone wants to see.”

Hiring Ramirez was a natural next step. As a colleague of Coleman’s from UCSD, he’s been a part of Fitabase since it first formed in 2009 (part of his dissertation used the Fitbit data from someone who had worn the device for five and a half years), although his formal role wasn’t assumed until after he received his Ph.D this year.

Of course, even with all the research to stand on, Fitbit has had its share of allegations of inaccuracy. Lawsuits have come up over the sleep tracker and fitness devices. But Fitabase says, given the difficulty of truly objective measure, compounded by the fact that the data isn’t taken in a highly structured lab environment, that’s to be expected.

“Real world assessment has had some standard of error, yes, and to put Fitbit up against the gold standard of something that you could never do on this scale,” said Coleman.

Also, Coleman said, studies with Fitbit devices are larger, with more people cooperating with the requirements than those in a traditional study.

“Accuracy and validation is something everything will ask about,” Ramirez added. “What we are trying to is make a different in people’s lives on a large scale. If it is off to the effect that it’s 10,000 steps versus 10,045, that’s not the point. It’s about larger, broader strokes; interventions that would help people change their behavior.”

It helps that Fitbit has such a wide consumer appeal, which allows for monitoring to happen almost unnoticeably, so the focus can be on designing more innovative studies or capture a huge trove of data from thousands of people at a time.

Researchers also often have to rely on self-reported data, which are subject to a number of biases and measurement errors, especially as related to physical activity and sleep.

Neither Coleman nor Ramirez alluded to an acquisition by Fitbit, but both said the company will spend the next months and year creating more research projects, and even taking on advisory roles for study design and grant processes.

“We don’t want to be a device maker,” Coleman said. “But you will see us integrate sensors into all sorts of things – blood pressure cuffs, weight scales, diabetes research, wireless glucose monitors; those kinds of things that help research. Anything where physical activity is a part of it and we’ve heard, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had a Fitbit?”