Presentation on possibilities of leveraging biometric data on wearables, plus discussion of data on happiness from the Pebble Happiness App, a tracker for your moods and the drivers behind them.

1. BEYOND STEPS
Leveraging wearable interaction models for more
effective health products
Susan Holcomb, Head of Data @ Pebble
holcombdata@gmail.com

2. About Pebble
• 2012: Record-breaking $10MM Kickstarter
campaign
• First use cases:
• Notifications, Apps, Telling the time!

3. Pebble Health
• Activity tracking: now table stakes for wearables
• Pebble Health features…
• Step- and sleep-tracking
• Activity classifications
• Personalized feedback
• Smart alarm
• Calendar integration (workout
scheduling)
• Heart rate sensor (coming Q4 2016)

4. Behavior change
New sensors & passive data collection
enable a lot of cool experiences…
…but what encourages healthier behaviors?

5. UbiFit Garden Experiment1
• Goal: Reduce sedentary time
• What’s more important…
• Passive data collection?
• Or ambient feedback?
• Ambient feedback = visualization of
progress that user can see at a
glance (no need to open an app)

6. UbiFit Garden Experiment
• Result: Ambient feedback made the difference
• Without glanceable display: Average Activity Duration
decreased over time
• With glanceable display: Average Activity Duration was
maintained
• Interaction model is key to encouraging
sustainable behavioral change

7. Engagement on wearables
• Wearables can take better advantage of this
interaction model
• What we can’t do with sensors, we can make
up for via user engagement
• What if we just ask users for the data we want?

8. The Happiness App: Overview
• One-week program for mood tracking
• Prompt user to rate mood & energy
• Plus: where they are, who they’re with, what they’re doing
• Customize w/ voice input through microphone!
• End of week: email report w/ personalized analysis

9. The Happiness App: Feedback
“One of the best uses of my
pebble. Being on my wrist the
hourly buzz I responded to,
unlike many things like phone
apps.”
“I absolutely love the app and my
counselor thought it was a
great idea!”
“App design and functionality
were everything I had hoped to
build myself, you guys knocked it
out of the park”
“Excited to the see the results,
tracking my mood actually
helped to make me feel more
"present.”

10. The Happiness App: Findings
• Users report two-fold benefits:
• Insights from summary report data
• Increased mindfulness from mood & energy check-ins
• But don’t ditch the sensors: future plans to
integrate results with activity & sleep data
• We can validate a variety of research with the
snap of our fingers

11. The Happiness App: Aggregated Data3
• Research says: 7pm is the happiest hour of the day4
• Pebble data: peak in mood at 7pm
* See full results on medium.com/pebble-research

12. The Happiness App: Aggregated Data
• Research says: good relationships, sociability increase
happiness5
• Pebble data: best mood scores w/ friends, at social events

13. The Happiness App: Aggregated Data
• Research says: alcohol has short-term positive impact on
mood6
• Pebble data: alcohol aligns with euphoria (in the moment)
—but don’t forget about yoga, exercise, and socializing!

14. The Happiness App: Aggregated Data
• Research says: Energy peaks in late morning, declines
with an afternoon slump7,8
• Pebble data: high in morning, declines 12-5pm, boosts @
7pm (possibly thanks to the happiness peak)

15. The Happiness App: Aggregated Data
• Also apparent: positive impact of yoga & exercise on
energy levels

16. Future development
• Building off the happiness app: same functionality, more
use cases
• Be more active, manage anxiety, quit smoking, improve
sleep, run a marathon….
• Collaborating with Mobilize Research Center @ Stanford
• Aggregated data suggests power of research at scale
• Published step- and sleep-tracking algorithms
• Data questions? Contact: holcombdata@gmail.com

17. Purchase History
(watch faces, etc)
Device Usage Data
Companion App
Usage Data
Website
App Data
• Lack of visibility into core KPIs
(e.g. How many users turned on their pebble watch today?)
• Product Management, Data Science, and BizOps teams
couldn’t get raw data from legacy systems
• No engineers to support growing data science team
• No bandwidth to setup or maintain analytics infrastructure
Pains Benefits
• Both historical and streaming data centralized to
Treasure Data in just 15 days
• Fast, direct access to data for all non-technical
users in the company
• No engineering overhead (even with exponential
growth in data volumes)

18. References
1 Consolvo S, et al. Flowers or a Robot Army? Encouraging Awareness &
Activity with Personal, Mobile Displays. Proceedings of the 10th international
conference on Ubiquitous computing, 54-63. 2008.
2 Legere, John (JohnLegere), “This app might break”, 9 June 2016, 7:19am.
3 Shapiro, H. The Secret to Happiness. Pebble Research Blog. 2016.
4 Guillaume E, Baranski E, et al. The World at 7:00: Comparing the Experience
of Situations Across 20 Countries. Journal of Personality. 2016.
5 Diener E, Seligmen M. Very Happy People. Psychological Science. 2002.
6 Geiger B, MacKerron G. Can alcohol make you happy? A subjective wellbeing
approach. Social Science & Medicine. 2016.
7 Matchock R, Mordkoff J. Chronotype and time-of-day influences on the
alerting, orienting, and executive components of attention. Experimental Brain
Research. 2009.
8 Shellenbarger S. The Peak Time for Everything. Wall Street Journal. 2012.