Fitbit buys Twine Health in bid to become a more serious healthcare tool
Fitbit’s been on a bit of an acquisition spree over the last couple of years, as the company’s looked to grow its business inside the stagnating wearables category. The hardware maker announced plans to pick up Twine Health, a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based health management platform.
The company hasn’t disclosed specific numbers for the acquisition, but expects the deal to close at some point in Q1 of this year. The integration plan seems pretty straight forward, leveraging Twine’s service with Fitbit’s large customer base, in an attempt to offer up more complex and useful healthcare data collected by its line of wearables. Specifically, the dataset will focus on hypertension and diabetes.
Fitbit and Apple have been particularly aggressive in a push to get their wearables taken more seriously as potential healthcare tools. In recent years, fitness trackers and smartwatches have become among the most widespread personal monitoring devices around.
While the products don’t rate as sophisticated medical equipment, they do contain enough data tracking to provide potentially useful insight into a large cross-section of the population. With this acquisition, Fitbit is no doubt hoping that its line of devices will become more indispensable for users with chronic health conditions that require daily tracking.
No specifics on what will happen to Twine’s Cambridge, Massachusetts-based staff, but the company is set to roll into Fitbit’s Health Solutions wing, with co-founder and CEO John Moore serving as the company’s Medical Director.
