Let’s face it, Fitbit wasn’t going anywhere (no pun intended), the fitness tracker designed for health conscious people who want to keep track of their physical activity like heart rate, steps, calorie burnt level was itself burning out. Having exploded into the market a decade ago the San Francisco start-up is seeing dipping sales, failed exploits and currently hovers in fourth place in the wearable business.

While the evident is clear in the wearable market of saturation, company’s like Apple and Google are looking at another aspect of the hardware that wearable manufacturers wont be able to tap into, which is  data. The valuable information gathered by these trackers are worth in gold in the medical sector, which could be why Google is paying US$2.1 billion for Fitbit.

Google has assured users that it will not use the data harvested in any way and will be transparent about the data. The search giant went on to state that it will never sell personal information to anyone nor will it use Fitbit health and wellness data for Google ads. Where Fitibit failed, Google will expand – WearOS and Google Fit is geared to tap into the 28 million Fitbit users and give Apple a stiff competition. Hospitals and insurance industries are waiting at the flanks for technology that can offer predictive diagnosis for patients. Governments budget allocation for medical is usually high after education and these tech giants are surely eyeing this.

Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers rely on operating software’s to give life to their wearables and for the likes of Fitbit the battle is tough as China made Xiaomi and Huawei wearable also use the same OS but offer them at 1/3 the price. The failure in Fitbit is that the company could not stay long enough in the game to go beyond hardware and look at solving global healthcare in general. But Google can, the amount paid to acquire Fitbit is peanuts if the stakes mentioned above is what the tech giant is really after!