Disney's "Magic Band" offers bridge between consumers and digital health

Disney's Magic Band, first implemented in 2013, could bridge the gap between wearable tech and the healthcare industry, according to John Reites of Quintiles. In a speech to the Develop Innovate Advance (DIA) conference, he compared the Magic Band, which uses radio frequency ID chips and sensors to allow wearers access to their hotel, rides and food while inside the park, offering a huge amount of data for insights into what wearers did and for how long. Mr Reites called for more "strategic thinking" on the use of wearables in healthcare.

Digital health is a critical part of the conversation at the DIA conference in Philadelphia this week, particularly as to how it is playing a role in the design of clinical studies. In a session on strategies enable digital health approaches to scale from pilots to platforms, John Reites of Quintiles took a moment to talk about a wearable platform that he thinks offers some important lessons for how the healthcare industry should be thinking about using wearables. Perhaps surprisingly, it comes from the land of Disney.

Reites noted that Disney’s MagicBand wearable and companion app, implemented at Disney World and Epcot Center in 2013, offered some important lessons for digital health. Why? It embraces an intuitive design. It depends on a network of 100 systems organized through teams and partnerships to make it work.

Visitors who have scheduled a vacation to Disney World get the MagicBand in advance or they can buy it online. It uses RFID chips and a radio that transmits a signal to sensors around the park, giving users access to their hotel room, rides, and meals when their wristband makes contact with an access point. The company is able to use the data to get insights on which families did what and for how long — the kind of details that sound a little creepy from a personal standpoint but are ideally used to create a better experience. Wired did an in-depth look at the Disney wearables.

One point Reites made was that patients/consumers/users need the wearables, apps they are expected to use in a study so easy to embrace that adherence becomes less of an issue. He emphasized the need the make adoption of wearables an “omnichannel experience,” like Disney’s, to create a frictionless engagement experience.

He encouraged those who want to apply remote monitoring to a clinical study to ask basic questions of themselves before they moved ahead and think about the key stakeholders — what value will patients (and the organizers) derive from it? What’s the objective? What’s the business case?

“Lots of people say, ‘I want to put this wearable in a study and let’s do it. But there’s not enough strategic thinking about what they want to get out of it,” Reites said.

Photo: YouTube