Building H #85: Signs of Progress

One of our core aims at Building H is to see more and more commercial products that make it easier for people to live healthy lives — to eat well, move physically, sleep longer and better, engage socially and spend time outdoors and in nature. We look closely at how new technologies tend to shape these behaviors (see our last edition, for example) and raise concerns when the tech and product trends push in the opposite direction. 

So we were excited to see a number of recent stories that point to commercial efforts aimed at facilitating these healthy behaviors. First, there is a roundup from Vogue on a group of new products that leverage technology in the service of helping people get better sleep. These range from the well-known Oura ring, that monitors sleep performance, to smart mattresses, a face massager, and various stress-relief and soothing gadgets. Read: Night Night? A New Wave of Tech Is Out to Optimize Sleep.

The “food as medicine” movement is starting to happen and there’s money attached, which is starting to draw more commercial interest. Instacart, which has doubled down in health features in the last year, has developed tools to make it easy for physicians to prescribe healthy food just as if they were prescribing medication. Now Uber is entering the same market, betting that the market for prescribing (and delivering) healthy food is about to get big. Read: Uber is going toe-to-toe with Instacart in a bet that delivering groceries can cut healthcare costs by billions.

Apple’s permeation of our lives is so extensive that their health impacts are widely varied:  they provide platforms that on aggregate can influence behavior negatively while also exploiting those platforms to offer beneficial health features. In the latter category, we learned recently that they’ve leveraged sensors on the Apple Watch to enable users to track the amount of daylight (or time outdoors) they get each day, effectively encouraging their users to get more outdoor time. Read: Apple unveils watchOS 10 with new features for mental health, vision health. (Note: the article incorrectly states that greater sun exposure increases risk of nearsightedness – the opposite is true.)

There’s a long-term trend of more and more people living alone in the US. We’ve gone from about 14% of households in the 1960s to approximately 28% in more recent years. So it’s exciting to see real estate developments that affirmatively create social living situations. Bay State Cohousing has built a development outside of Boston that offers individual apartments while emphasizing shared spaces and shared activities – a common kitchen and large dining room, a music room, communal gardens and more. Alexandra Lange has the story for CityLab. Read: In Boston, a Colorful Cohousing Complex Is Built for Sharing.

These are, of course, just anecdotes, and not all of the approaches align with our vision (we’re less enthusiastic, for example, about products that track your health behaviors than we are about those that actually lead to, or require, healthy behaviors), but they are welcome developments. And, perhaps significantly, they suggest a demand for these healthy behaviors – it’s a positive sign that companies are pursuing sleep tech and that delivering healthy food is seen as both a good idea and a business opportunity. We’re seeing greater recognition of the importance – and the desirability – of these behaviors. And that seems like progress.

What signs of progress are you seeing? Comments are open.

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