Fitbit Wants To Help Corporations Track Employee Health

jfruh writes: Fitbit is pitching its iconic fitness trackers to businesses as a tool to save money on health care costs. Many companies have wellness programs to encourage workers to exercise more, and Fitbit will help employers quantify (and monitor) employee progress. “We think virtually every company will incorporate fitness trackers into their corporate wellness programs,” Fitbit CFO Bill Zerella said

Comments

Great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they can come monitor my food when I'm at home or out about town, too?

And maybe they can monitor when I wake and sleep.

And maybe monitor what kind of air I breath in my part of town.

And maybe they can just get a direct pipe into all my medical records? I mean, since apparently we give no fucks anymore, right?

I have a better idea: You hire me to do a fucking job and I'll do the fucking job and we'll leave our involvement with each other right fucking there.

Re:Great idea!

[NotDrWho]

I'll willingly give them a stool sample if they like.

Re:Great idea!

[ColdWetDog]

Maybe they can come monitor my food when I'm at home or out about town, too?

And maybe they can monitor when I wake and sleep.

And maybe monitor what kind of air I breath in my part of town.

And maybe they can just get a direct pipe into all my medical records? I mean, since apparently we give no fucks anymore, right?

I have a better idea: You hire me to do a fucking job and I'll do the fucking job and we'll leave our involvement with each other right fucking there.

"They know when you've been sleeping,
They know when you're awake,
They know when you've been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake."

And who says childhood never ends?

Re:Great idea!

[OhPlz]

I see both sides on this one and I'm not sure which is the better argument. It doesn't seem right to force workers to have their privacy invaded at such intimate levels in order to qualify for a benefit. I do also see the argument that unhealthy sloths can jack the cost of insurance up for everyone at the company. IMO, the real answer isn't wellness programs, it's get health insurance out of the hands of employers. I want to buy my own policy that I can keep wherever I work. Technically that's possible today but going from a group to an individual means the premium is unapproachable. Yet if everyone or even a significant number of people did this, it'd be like auto insurance where they'd be a healthy marketplace for it and premiums would be approachable. Instead of trying for single payer, Obamacare could have been a slam dunk if it could pull this off. Instead, we got the worst possible outcome. The states don't want the marketplace approach nor should they, and the employers remain the dominant path to getting coverage. We need a free market, not a state market, not employer provided.

Not just corporations

[93 Escort Wagon]

I work for the University of Washington (so I'm a state employee), and starting with 2015 our health plan has included a "wellness incentive" which, if met, drops $125 off an employee's annual deductible. For this current year, it was a simple matter of making a couple attestations ("I don't smoke", "I exercise at least 3 days a week"). For 2016, though, it's gotten a bit more intrusive - one of the ways you can earn points towards the incentive is to record daily step counts and exceed 35000 steps per week, which you could either do manually or by giving the website access to your FitBit data (it also supported several other trackers). Other ways to earn points included "Try Tai Chi", "Fill out an Advance Directive", "See a Mentor", "No Stress Mondays", and so on.

Given the move Washington State has made towards both intrusiveness and nanny-state-dom, and given that by state law pretty much all our job-related data is public record, I would not be surprised if at some point people who gave permission to access their fitness trackers to find that someone in the monitoring chain started checking when activity is occurring. This could be a problem for someone if, like me, they often don't get a conventional lunch hour due to job duties. I'm often eating after 1pm (or even after 2pm) simply because it works better with tasks I'm doing - so when I go for my lunchtime walk, it's not usually between 12 and 1. Fortunately I'm not naive enough to give them access to my Garmin Viviosmart data, but a less paranoid person could end up with a nasty surprise come annual evaluation time.

Re:Is it 1984 yet?

[cayenne8]

Yep...'cause if you have to wear these things, they'll likely be getting GPS information on you after you leave work.

Oops, PHil...appears you've been regularly stopping off at bar on the way home, that's gonna be a bit of a risk to us for your health ins....

Re:Fat Shaming

[Penguinisto]

...and yet many companies use United Healthcare, which has this neat little program where nicotine users (cigs, dip, vape, whatever) get to pay an extra $70/mo. for their health insurance, and if your spouse smokes? That'll be $140/mo that you get pay, please.

Oh, you don't partake and claim yourself exempt? You get random annual bodily-fluid testing where you get to prove that you're nicotine-free.

Did I mention that if caught smoking when you said you didn't? You get fired for-cause.