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In announcing its planned $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness tracking company Fitbit, Google said the deal will “help spur innovation in wearables” — at least, that’s how Senior Vice President of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh put it in a blog post. If completed, the move would spell the end of an independent Fitbit, a 12-year-old hardware firm credited with popularizing the self-quantifying phenomenon that has so many of us comparing our daily step counts against our friends and loved ones.
Google has already spent big money on wearable tech — in 2019, it paid $40 million for technology and personnel from watchmaker Fossil Group’s research and development team, for instance. But the company’s products haven’t matched up to the competition, like the Apple Watch or Samsung’s Galaxy Watch. Fitbit’s technical chops could help Google come up with a wearable to take on its biggest rivals. With the revenue from smartwatch sales industry-wide set to double to $34 billion by 2023, the company’s urgency is understandable. It’s also a familiar play: Google purchased portions of smartphone maker HTC in 2017 for $1.1 billion, jumpstarting production of its Pixel smartphones.
But Google already has plenty of hardware and software chops. What else does it get out of the Fitbit deal?
The most obvious potential lure is the health data of millions of Fitbit customers. Fitbit devices have been tracking wearers’ health metrics for over a decade, cataloging behaviors like steps taken, calories burned and exercises performed. That’s just the kind of thing Google, fundamentally an advertising company, needs to further build out its profile of, well, you. Advertisers already take educated guesses at your health status, with apps like period trackers sharing your info with Facebook and others.
Still, Osterloh promises that “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.” What else, then, does Fitbit have that’s attractive to Google?
Google’s rivals, most notably Apple, have embraced healthcare as the next big battleground in the tech world, attracted by the promises of big profits for those who can help simplify a byzantine system. Google’s healthcare efforts have been decidedly quieter. The healthcare tech space could be worth $24 billion by 2020, according to an estimate from Statista. Through its health-focused Verily subsidy, Google has been working on cardiovascular health, diabetes and more, but it hasn’t been publicly pushing healthcare as a business proposition.
Fitbit, however, has been doing exactly that. It’s already working with insurance companies, other firms and even the government of Singapore to provide customers, employees and citizens with fitness trackers in what are likely lucrative deals, for instance. Gartner senior analyst Alan Antin says Google could benefit from Fitbit’s expertise in working alongside corporate partners and other stakeholders in the healthcare world. “There’s the lesser known side business-to-business side of Fitbit, which is their partnerships with health insurance companies and direct corporate wellness programming,” says Gartner senior analyst Alan Antin. “Those are things that are a little bit harder for a company like Google to do.”
For his part, Fitbit CEO James Park has said that, for technology companies seeking success in the healthcare world, relationships like Fitbit has are key. “The healthcare system is incredibly complex and it takes working with a lot of different big players to have a big impact,” Park said in an October interview with TIME. “And, you know, our goal is to make this stuff that we’re working on available and accessible to as many people around the world. And we can only do that by working with the largest players in healthcare.”
For Google, Fitbit’s healthcare ties, along with its established base of users, might be exactly what it needs to give its wearable device strategy a shot in the arm. “If they wanted to have their own smartwatch, they certainly have the distribution channels, they have all the software and hardware capabilities to do their own, and they could go and enter that market pretty quickly,” says Antin. “But the [healthcare partnerships] I mentioned are ones you can’t really get into quickly. To me, that’s where they saw the bigger value.”
As a parent, you often may feel like a superhuman circus act as you help bathe, dress, feed, teach, console, and do a multitude of additional tasks for children who seem to have an endless supply of needs. You may feel exhausted by all of the demands, but it also can be rewarding to feel needed. “They only are so small for so long,” you may think, “so I’ll just do this for now.”
Hold that thought for a moment. Remember that one of your roles as a parent is to prepare your child for an independent, self-sufficient life. If you find that you often step in quickly to help, you may inadvertently communicate that your child is helpless and incapable. How can you strike a balance between nurturing and fostering independence by facilitating competence and confidence?
Here are some strategies to guide you.
Remember how good it felt to be able to do something yourself, what the “big kids” were doing? Create opportunities for your children to feel the same way and learn that they are just as capable as the big kids. By practicing skills, your child will know how to be a big kid when the time arrives. For example:
Giving children opportunities to establish mastery by engaging them in chores encourages them to believe that they are capable and helpful. Doing this gradually teaches children how to take care of themselves without feeling abandoned. Select around three behaviors to have a child practice each day. These behaviors can shift over time to match your child’s developmental stage.
You can establish a chore chart by age 2. Although that may sound early, it is important to start as soon as possible so that children establish self-confidence from the get-go. A toddler can practice putting toys away, a 4-year-old can help feed pets, and a 6-year-old can put laundry away. The American Academy of Adolescent and Child Psychiatry has many other age-appropriate suggestions for chores.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, linking allowance to chores can create opportunities for children to learn how to manage money. Select chores that serve the household, rather than only the children — for example, unloading the dishwasher instead of self-care activities. That way, money is earned for helping the greater community and not just oneself.
You can start with a very small amount of change that a child can earn per chore. The amount can increase as a child ages. To help children learn the concepts of saving and planning their spending, they can divide what they earn into three containers: “save,” “spend,” and “give.” The “save” container helps children practice saving for the future. The “spend” container allows them to decide whether that toy in the toy store is worth hard-earned money. Perhaps a toy that costs more money is worth the wait. The “give” container can help foster the gesture of spending some of what one earns on others, such as siblings or charitable organizations.
Children do grow up quickly. Yet you still can savor the moments while also preparing children for the future.
The post How to foster independence in children appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.
If there is any field of science that understands the doctrine of unintended consequences, it’s medicine. We rely on antibiotics to wipe out infections, and in the process breed a class of superbugs resistant to the drugs. We develop powerful medications that can control chronic pain, and in the U.S., have a nationwide addiction crisis to show for that breakthrough.
Now, it appears, we can add asthma control to the list pharmaceutical blowbacks we didn’t see coming. According to a new study published in BMJ Open, the familiar lightweight, pocket-sized aerosolized inhalers that make breathing easier for so many of the 235 million people worldwide who suffer from asthma may be choking the planet on a powerful greenhouse gas they release in the process.
The study, led by Dr. Alexander JK Wilkinson, a respiratory specialist with Britain’s National Health Service, focused on the 4.67 million people diagnosed with asthma in the United Kingdom, but it has implications for treatment worldwide, including in the U.S., where 22.6 million people (6.1 million of them children) are afflicted with the condition. The researcher compared the greenhouse gas emissions of aerosol pumps—known as metered dose inhalers (MDI)—with dry powder inhalers (DPI), which are shaped something like a hockey puck and are activated simply by inhaling. The two weren’t even close.
The problem with MDIs is not carbon dioxide (the most common greenhouse gas), but rather methane, which represents a far smaller share of greenhouse emissions, but a much more powerful one, with up to 84 times the heat-trapping power of CO2. Even the least polluting inhaler was found to emit methane at levels equal to up to 10 kg (22 lbs.) of carbon dioxide into the air over the course of its 200-puff lifetime. The worst emitted the equivalent of more than 36 kg (79 lbs) of CO2.
Dry powder inhalers, by comparison, use no methane propellants at all. To the extent that they have any carbon footprint, it’s mostly from their manufacture and disposal, and the numbers are comparatively small—from 1.5 kg to 6 kg (3.3 lbs to 13 lbs) CO2 equivalent depending on brand.
In the U.K., MDIs represent about 70% of all inhaler prescriptions and the researchers estimate they are responsible for releasing the equivalent of 635,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. If just 10% of those patients switched to DPIs, the equivalent of 58,000 metric tons of CO2 could be kept out of the atmosphere. That, Britain’s Sky News pointed out, is the same carbon footprint as 180,000 gas-powered cars driving making the round-trip journey between London and Edinburgh—about 1,300 km (or approximately 800 miles) each.
What makes such a switchover especially important, the study argues, is that many of the people who are hurt most by all this MDI outgassing are the very people the inhalers are designed to help. “Climate change is a huge and present threat to health which will disproportionately impact the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet,” the researchers wrote, “including people with pre-existing lung disease.”
Across the rest of Europe, less than 50% of inhalers prescribed are MDIs and in Scandinavia it’s barely 10%. The difference, in most cases, is less about pharmaceutical efficacy than simply local medical custom and practice.
The authors are not calling for a blanket elimination of MDIs. Dry powder inhalers require patients to have at least enough lung strength to draw in the medication, and many do not. For them, the forced puff of an MDI is the only way to administer the drug.
“We recognize the need to protect the environment,” said Jesica Kirby, head of health advice for the advocacy group Asthma UK, in a statement responding to the study, “but it’s critically important that people with asthma receive the medicines they need to stay well and avoid a life-threatening asthma attack.”
As with so many things medical, the right solution is all about finding the proper balance between cost and benefits. In the case of asthma, the benefit of dialing back the aerosols and turning to alternatives whenever possible can accrue to not just individual patients, but the planet at large.
