Under Armour Leverages IBM’s Watson to Challenge Fitbit

One of the biggest brands in athletic wear is charging into wearable tech with a pack of products and a pair of tech industry partnerships. Under Armour is leveraging artificial intelligence to give its offering an edge over competing products from Nike and Fitbit.

Retailing for $400, HealthBox is a trio consisting of a Fitbit-like band, a digital scale and a heart-rate monitor. And UA isn’t starting from zero in its effort to tap demand for wearables.

Building a Fitness Data Empire

Over the last few years, the company has snagged three massive online fitness communities: Endomondo, MapMyFitness and MyFitnessPal. They now control the largest online wellness-focused ecosystem, at 165 million users. And it’s what HealthBox can do with all that data that makes this a compelling package.

The strategy was a bet that the valuable part of fitness tech is the data rather than the gadget. A band or a scale is something rivals can copy. Years of workouts, meals and weigh-ins from millions of people are much harder to match, and that’s the asset Under Armour paid for when it bought those apps.

Under Armour partnered with HTC to develop the hardware and a smartphone app called UA Record, which ties all the products together. The UA fitness tracker is cleanly designed, made of a rubber-like material with a LED display. The heart rate monitor is constructed of durable band and the monitor glows when it detects a heartbeat. The scale measures weight and BMI. All the data from the three devices talk to each other and transfer data via Bluetooth to UA Record.

Cognitive Coaching

Under Armour’s partnership with IBM and the “cognitive coaching” potential of Watson differentiates HealthBox from the competition. By feeding nutrition, training, and sleep information into Watson, it’s “able to understand data in large volumes, make recommendations, and continuously learn,” says Chris Glodé, Under Armour’s VP digital, connected fitness. “The more data UA Record inputs, the smarter Watson becomes.”

UA has experimented with Internet of Things in the past. They built a sensor-laden compression T-shirt back in 2011 for the NFL Combine, where college stars worked out for prospective pro teams. The shirt provided raw data on acceleration, speed and heart rate for scouts to pore over. HealthBox and the partnership with IBM means that the Record app will be able to send the data to Watson to disambiguate.

Watson’s Cognitive Coaching uses a comparative model, grouping users based on criteria like age, gender and activity level in order to provide training and recovery recommendations.

And the experience will get richer over time.

“As you record more data and as more data is recorded across the community, the smarter the insights will become,” Glodé says.

How the Bet Played Out

The data strategy didn’t last in the form Under Armour planned. Owning a huge user base also meant protecting it, and in March 2018 the company said personal details of about 150 million MyFitnessPal users had been compromised in a breach. The accounts were hit in February, and the breach wasn’t discovered until March 25.

Then, in October 2020, Under Armour pulled back from much of its digital fitness business. It agreed to sell MyFitnessPal to private equity firm Francisco Partners for $345 million, less than the $475 million it paid in 2015, and announced that Endomondo would shut down at the end of that year. Under Armour kept MapMyFitness, which it called “a crucial element” of its digital strategy alongside its connected footwear.

IBM also stepped back from health. In January 2022, it agreed to sell healthcare data and analytics assets from its Watson Health business, again to Francisco Partners, as it narrowed its focus to hybrid cloud and AI. And Fitbit, one of the rivals HealthBox was meant to beat, ended up inside a much bigger tech company when Google completed its acquisition of Fitbit in January 2021.

Lessons From HealthBox

Under Armour’s pitch in 2016 made sense on paper: combine hardware, a giant community and an AI partner, and the product gets smarter the more people use it. In practice, a sportswear company found itself running consumer apps, defending a vast pool of personal data and competing with tech companies whose core business was devices and software.

The idea at the centre of HealthBox hasn’t gone away. Fitness trackers still promise coaching built from your own data and data from people like you. What changed is who’s best placed to deliver it. For brands outside tech, the Under Armour story is a reminder that buying users is the easy part, and that holding sensitive health data brings security and running costs that don’t show up in the launch announcement.