For those of you who know me well, you know I once considered developing a product very similar to Withings–the wi-fi connected body weight and body mass scale. My idea was identical in the basic concepts of a consumer friendly wi-fi scale with an associated web and mobile tracking component. But I’ll get into the similarities and dissimilarities more in a separate, second post. First though I want to identify why I think this product could be representative of a larger trend that I very much believe in.

A lot of exciting things have happened on the web and with technology over the past 20 years. Yet, there have been precious few advancements from either the web or gadgets (or their intersection) which are health related that I regularly use. Consumer health on the web began and ended with WebMD and its clones. That is until Nike Plus. Nike Plus represented a new way to interact with health data combining the physical with the virtual. And Nike Plus is damned good (Need proof? It sold 1mm units in the first 4 months). It demonstrates how you can take something patently boring and horrible like a pedometer and turn it into a mass market hit that is genuinely useful for millions of people by informing and motivating their training and health. But why stop there?

And I am not talking about your $400 Garmin GPS watches for triathletes. Yawwwn. I am talking about a much more interesting and much larger market: preventive consumer healthcare in the home. Reset your expectations to the tens of billions of dollars. That’s where this market could and should go in the next decade.

What am I talking about? I want internet connected scales, blood pressure monitors, sleep monitors, glucose monitors and more–aimed at everywhere from the mass market to granular niches. Some people will read this list and get it instantly. Some will think WTF? But remind yourself it’s all about the execution: think pedometer vs. Nike Plus. The distinction is subtle but critical. The products need to be 1) simple to use and 2) the results need to be made meaningful to your target customer–and it can’t just be a bunch of data puked into Excel or a web page (which is how it’s currently done on today’s most advanced USB/Bluetooth products.) These need to be consumer devices at the end of the day even if the data is synced to a healthcare provider at some point.

If you design and market these devices the “healthcare way”, this whole idea is destination Titanic from the get-go. The vision might be obvious enough as evidenced by the Continua Health Alliance, but good execution will be very, very hard to find. (Most Continua members demonstrate the precise opposite.) I think Withings represents the cutting edge of this non-fitness, consumer -healthcare market that combines the web and smart devices. And when I bring up Nike Plus as the role model, I don’t mean it should be done with the Nike Plus target market or marketing in mind–this is not about getting in shape and is not targeted for fitness freaks. These devices are for a decidedly different target and would require decidedly different marketing and branding, but that doesn’t equal marketing it like you would a goddam enema.

Is it even possible to make some of these products sexy? Wrong question.

You don’t need to make them sexy. To reiterate, you just need to make them 1) user friendly enough that the target audience will be able to frequently use them and 2) have results that are easily understood. Here’s a slide on brand positioning from the original business plan I put together in late 2006 / early 2007. The blue arrows indicates where I think these sorts of devices could be placed on a spectrum from “Full Metal Jacket” to “Mister Rogers.”

So who would these devices be for? Oh, any one of the tens of millions of Americans who deals with obesity, hypertension, diabetes, heart attack, stroke, insomnia, etc. Is it a big market? You betcha. Is this the beginning of all this? I hope so. I hope we start seeing more and more entrepreneurs in this space because the big healthcare players get the concepts of “user-friendly” “marketing” and “web” about as well as Attila the Hun understood the concept of diplomacy.

The upcoming Withings: Part II will include a review of the Withings scale and a comparison to my original business plan. Stay tuned.