Jawbone Jumps Into Employee Monitoring

Jawbone is the latest fitness tracker that wants to help employers better-track their staff to lower health care costs. It’s launched Up for Groups, a service by which companies can buy Jawbone’s fitness trackers in bulk at a discount and use Jawbone’s dashboard software to track how they’re being used in aggregate. Till now they’ve only been able to access their employee’s Jawbone data through the company’s API.

It’s another move that will help spur the trend for companies to integrate wearable devices like the Jawbone, Fitbit or Misfit wearable gadgets into their corporate wellness programs. These are incentive plans aimed at keeping insurance costs in check -- the fitter you are, the cheaper you are to your bosses, essentially. More employers are betting that tracking daily step counts and rewarding staff with money or other incentives will be worth the hassle in the long run.

Jawbone is a little late to the game with this. Fitbit started selling its trackers in bulk to employers in 2010, along with software that HR managers can use to track steps. There’s also a host of startups, like Jiff, WelBe and Pact, who sell software that employers can use to track and incentive their staff on any wearable device. While it’s early days, Fitbit has said in the past that sales to employers are one of the fastest growing parts of its business.

In a way, Jawbone might actually benefit from coming in late. Its profit margins won’t take too much of a hit if it sells into a new market that is just taking off.

Jawbone may well have ambitious plans for selling to employers and potentially even insurers. Last year it spent a reported $100 million on Body Media, a maker of highly-sophisticated wearable sensors that could detect sweat, body temperature and galvanic skin response for a better read on someone’s activity. Since then Body Media has been running a trial program with U.S. health insurer Cigna , to track the health of thousands of Americans who are at risk of diabetes. The trial participants who are wearing Body Media’s multi-sensor arm bands are all insured through employers who want to cut down the rate of diabetes in their workforce.

“We’ve been asked by different employers to create dashboards that help enable the tracking,” Jawbone’s VP of product management Travis Bogard said in an interview with Forbes last April. Jawbone has since conducted trials of its proprietary tracking software with partners before launching Up for Groups this week.

The company’s data team, lead by former LinkedIn data scientist Monica Rogati, has been running dozens of tests in the last year on Jawbone’s consumer users to figure out how best to combine its data with phone notifications to change behavior. Exclusive behavioral insights around how to get people to sleep more or walk more, when plugged into Jawbone’s tracking software, could be attractive to employers. “It will definitely be about the data as we move forward,” Bogard said. “We’ll see a lot of ways to monetize that.“

Up for Groups is meant for groups of employees of at least 10 people, and its software won’t calculate metrics unless at least five people are being anonymously tracked. This deters employers from singling out any staff members. Fitbit and its peers have long said that when their trackers are used between friends or as part of a group, they are less likely to end up at the bottom of drawer after a month or so of use.

Ultimately, selling its tracking software to employers could be the next important step for Jawbone to make money from its Big Data and behavioral expertise.