It was December 2006. Twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur James Park had simply bought a Wii sport system. It included the Wii Nunchuk, a US $29 handheld controller with movement sensors that permit sport gamers work together by transferring their our bodies—swinging at a baseball, say, or boxing with a digital accomplice.

Park grew to become obsessed along with his Wii.

“I used to be a tech-gadget geek,” he says. “Anybody holding that nunchuk was fascinated by the way it labored. It was the primary time that I had seen a compelling client use for accelerometers.”

After some time, although, Park noticed a flaw within the Wii: It acquired you transferring, certain, but it surely trapped you in your front room. What if, he thought, you would take what was cool in regards to the Wii and use it in a gadget that acquired you out of the home?

The primary technology of Fitbit trackers shipped on this bundle in 2009. NewDealDesign

“That,” says Park, “was the aha second.” His thought grew to become Fitbit, an exercise tracker that has racked up gross sales of greater than 136 million models since its first iteration hit the market in late 2009.

However again to that “aha second.” Park shortly known as his buddy and colleague Eric Friedman. In 2002, the 2, each pc scientists by coaching, had began a photo-sharing firm known as HeyPix, which they bought to CNET in 2005. They had been nonetheless working for CNET in 2006, but it surely wasn’t a nasty time to consider doing one thing totally different.

Friedman cherished Park’s thought.

“My mom was an lively walker,” Friedman says. “She had a strolling group and all the time had a pedometer together with her. And my father labored with augmentative engineering [assistive technology] for the aged and handicapped. We’d performed with accelerometer tech earlier than. So it instantly made sense. We simply needed to refine it.”

The 2 left CNET, and in April 2007 they integrated the startup with Park as CEO and Friedman as chief know-how officer. Park and Friedman weren’t attempting to construct step one counter—mechanical pedometers date again to the Nineteen Sixties. They weren’t inventing the primary sensible exercise tracker—
BodyMedia, a medical machine producer, had in 1999 included accelerometers with different sensors in an armband designed to measure energy burned. And Park and Friedman didn’t get a wise client tracker to market first. In 2006, Nike had labored with Apple to launch the Nike+ for runners, a motion-tracking system that required a particular shoe and a receiver that plugged into an iPod

Fitbit’s founders James Park [left] and Eric Friedman launched their first product in 2009, when this photograph was taken. Peter DaSilva/The New York Occasions/Redux

Park wasn’t conscious of any of this when he thought of getting health out of the lounge, however the two shortly did their analysis and discovered what they did and didn’t need to do.

“We didn’t need to create one thing costly, focused at athletes,” he says. “Or one thing that was dumb and never related to software program. And we needed one thing that might present social connection, like photograph sharing did.”

That one thing needed to be snug to put on all day, be straightforward to make use of, add its information seamlessly so the information might be tracked and shared with buddies, and infrequently want charging. Not a simple mixture of necessities.

“It’s a kind of issues the place the easier you get, the tougher it turns into to design one thing effectively,” Park says.

The primary Fitbit was designed for ladies

The primary design resolution was the largest one. The place on the physique did they anticipate individuals to place this wearable? They weren’t going to ask individuals to purchase particular sneakers, just like the Nike+, or put on a thick band on their higher arms, like BodyMedia’s tracker.

They employed
NewDealDesign to determine a few of these particulars.

“In our first two weeks, after a number of discussions with Eric and James, we determined that the undertaking was going to be geared to ladies,” says Gadi Amit, president and principal designer of NewDealDesign. “That call was the driving force of the shape issue.”

“We needed to begin with one thing acquainted to individuals,” Park says, “and folks tended to clip pedometers to their belts.” So a clip-on machine made sense. However ladies typically don’t put on belts.

To do what it wanted to do, the clip-on gadget must include a roughly 2.5-by-2.5-centimeter (1-by-1-inch) printed circuit board, Amit remembers. The large breakthrough got here when the group determined to separate the electronics and the battery, which in most gadgets are stacked. “By doing that, and elongating it a bit, we discovered that ladies might put it wherever,” Amit says. “Many would put it of their bras, so we focused the design to suit a bra within the heart entrance, buying dozens of bras for testing.”

The choice to design for ladies additionally drove the general look, to “subdue the consumer interface,” as Amit places it. They hid a low-resolution monochrome OLED show behind a steady plastic cowl, with the show lighting up solely whenever you requested it to. This alternative helped give the machine a powerful battery life.

The earliest Fitbit gadgets used an animated flower as a progress indicator. NewDealDesign

In addition they got here up with the concept of a flower as a progress indicator—impressed, Park says, by the
Tamagotchi, one of many greatest toy fads of the late Nineties. “So we had a little bit animated flower that will shrink or develop primarily based on how lively you had been,” Park explains.

And after a lot dialogue over controls, the group gave the unique Fitbit only one button.

Hiring an EE—from Dad—to design Fitbit’s circuitry

Park and Friedman knew sufficient about electronics to construct a crude prototype, “stuffing electronics right into a field made from cut-up balsam wooden,” Park says. However in addition they knew that they wanted to herald an actual electrical engineer to develop the {hardware}.

Happily, they knew simply whom to name. Friedman’s father, Mark, had for years been working to develop a tool to be used in nursing houses, to remotely monitor the place of bed-bound sufferers. Mark’s accomplice on this effort was Randy Casciola, an electronics engineer and at the moment president of Morewood Design Labs.

Eric known as his dad, advised him in regards to the gadget he and Park envisioned, and requested if he and Casciola might construct a prototype.

“Mark and I assumed we’d construct a quick-and-dirty prototype, one thing they might get sensor information from and use for growing software program. After which they’d go off to Asia and get it miniaturized there,” Casciola remembers. “However one revision led to a different.” Casciola ended up engaged on circuit designs for Fitbits nearly full time till the sale of the corporate to Google, introduced in 2019 and accomplished in early 2021.

“We noticed some fairly scary producers. Soiled amenities, flash marks on their injection-molded plastics, very low precision.”
—James Park

“We had been simply two little guys in a little bit workplace in Pittsburgh,” Casciola says. “Earlier than Fitbit got here alongside, we had realized that our nursing-home factor wasn’t prone to ever be a product and had began taking up some consulting work. I had no thought Fitbit would turn out to be a family identify. I similar to engaged on something, whether or not I feel it’s a good suggestion or not, and even whether or not somebody is paying me or not.”

The earliest prototypes had been fairly massive, about 10 by 15 cm, Casciola says. They had been large enough to simply hook as much as check gear, but sufficiently small to strap on to a keen check topic.

After that, Park and Eric Friedman—together with Casciola, two contracted software program engineers, and a mechanical design agency—struggled with turning the cumbersome prototype right into a small and glossy machine that counted steps, saved information till it might be uploaded after which transmitted it seamlessly, had a easy consumer interface, and didn’t want each day charging.

“Determining the suitable steadiness of battery life, dimension, and functionality saved us occupied for a couple of yr,” Park says.

The Fitbit prototype, sitting on its charger, booted up for the primary time in December 2008. James Park

After deciding to incorporate a radio transmitter, they made a giant transfer: They turned away from the Bluetooth customary for wi-fi communications in favor of
the ANT protocol, a know-how developed by Garmin that used far much less energy. That meant the Fitbit wouldn’t be capable of add to computer systems immediately. As a substitute, the group designed their very own base station, which might be left plugged into a pc and would seize information anytime the Fitbit wearer handed inside vary.

Casciola didn’t have experience in radio-frequency engineering, so he relied on the provider of the ANT radio chips:
Nordic Semiconductor, in Trondheim, Norway.

“They might do a design assessment of the circuit board structure,” he explains. “Then we’d ship our {hardware} to Norway. They might do RF measurements on it and inform me the best way to tweak the values of the capacitors and conductors within the RF chain, and I might replace the schematic. It’s half engineering and half black magic to get this RF stuff working.”

One other customary they didn’t use was the ever-present USB charging connection.

“We couldn’t use USB,” Park says. “It simply took up an excessive amount of quantity. Any individual truly mentioned to us, ‘No matter you do, don’t design a customized charging system as a result of it’ll be a ache, it’ll be tremendous costly.’ However we went forward and constructed one. And it was a ache and tremendous costly, however I feel it added a stage of magic. You simply plopped your machine on [the charger]. It seemed lovely, and it labored constantly.”

A lot of the electronics they used had been off the shelf, together with a 16-bit Texas Devices MSP430 microprocessor, and 92 kilobytes of flash reminiscence and 4 kb of RAM to carry the working system, the remainder of the code, all of the graphics, and no less than seven days’ price of collected information.

The Fitbit was designed to withstand sweat, and so they typically survived showers and fast dips, says Friedman. “However sizzling tubs had been the bane of our existence. Individuals clipped it to their swimsuits and forgot that they had it on after they jumped into the recent tub.”

Fitbit’s demo or die second

Up so far, the corporate was surviving on $400,000 invested by Park, Friedman, and some individuals who had backed their earlier firm. However more cash could be wanted to ramp up manufacturing. And so a important subsequent step could be a dwell public demo, which they scheduled for the TechCrunch convention in San Francisco in September 2008.

Reside demonstrations of recent applied sciences are all the time dangerous, and this one walked proper as much as the sting of catastrophe. The plan was to ask an viewers member to name out a quantity, after which Park, carrying the prototype in its balsa-wood field, would stroll that variety of steps. The rely would sync wirelessly to a laptop computer projecting to a display on stage. When Friedman hit refresh on the browser, the step rely would seem on the display. What might go improper?

Loads. Friedman explains: “You assume counting steps is simple, however let’s say you do three steps. One, two, three. Once you carry your ft collectively, is {that a} step or is that the tip? It’s a lot simpler to rely 1,000 steps than it’s to do 10 steps. If I stroll 10 steps and am off by one, that’s a obtrusive error. With 1,000, that variance turns into noise.”

The primary semi-assembled Fitbit data its inaugural step rely. James Park

After a whole lot of apply, the 2 thought they might pull it off. Then got here the demo. “Whereas I used to be strolling, the laptop computer crashed,” Park says. “I wasn’t conscious of that. I used to be simply strolling fortunately. Eric needed to reboot all the things whereas I used to be nonetheless strolling. However the numbers confirmed up; I don’t assume anybody besides Eric realized what had occurred.”

That day, some 2,000 preorders poured in. And Fitbit closed a $2 million spherical of enterprise funding the following month.

Although Park and Friedman had hoped to get Fitbits into customers’ palms—or clipped onto their bras—by Christmas of 2008, they missed that deadline by a yr.

The algorithms that decide Fitbit’s rely

A part of Fitbit’s problem of getting from prototype to shippable product was software program growth. They couldn’t anticipate customers to stroll as exactly as Park did for the demo. As a substitute, the machine’s algorithms wanted to find out what a step was and what was a unique form of movement—say, somebody scratching their nostril.

“Information assortment was tough,” Park says. “Initially, it was a whole lot of us carrying prototype gadgets doing quite a lot of totally different actions. Our head of analysis, Shelten Yuen, would comply with, videotaping so we might return and rely the precise variety of steps taken. We might put on a number of gadgets concurrently, to match the information collects towards one another.”

Friedman remembers one such outing. “James was tethered to the pc, and he was pretending to stroll his canine across the Haight [in San Francisco], narrating this little play that he’s placing on: ‘OK, I’m going to cease. The canine goes to pee on this tree. And now he’s going over there.’ The beauty of San Francisco is that no one seems surprisingly at two guys tethered collectively strolling round speaking to themselves.”

“Older individuals are likely to have an irregular cadence—to the machine, older individuals look rather a lot like buses going over potholes.”–James Park

“Pushing child strollers was a problem,” as a result of the wearer’s arms aren’t swinging, Park says. “So considered one of our guys put an ET doll in a child stroller and walked everywhere in the metropolis with it.”

Street noise was one other massive difficulty. “Yuen, who was engaged on the algorithms, was primarily based in Cambridge, Mass.,” Park says. “They’ve extra potholes than we do. When he took the bus, the bus would hit the potholes and [the device would] be bouncing alongside, registering steps.” They couldn’t simply repair the problem by in search of a daily cadence to rely steps, he provides, as a result of not everybody has a daily cadence. “Older individuals are likely to have an irregular cadence—to the machine, older individuals look rather a lot like buses going over potholes.”

Fitbit’s founders enter the world of producing

A client gadget means mass manufacturing, probably in enormous portions. They talked to a whole lot of contract-manufacturing companies, Park remembers. They realized that as a startup with an unclear future market, they wouldn’t be of curiosity to the highest tier of producers. However they couldn’t go along with the lowest-budget operations, as a result of they wanted an inexpensive stage of high quality.

“We noticed some fairly scary producers,” Park mentioned. “Soiled amenities, flash marks on their injection-molded plastics [a sign of a bad seal or other errors], very low precision.” They finally discovered a small producer that was “fairly good however nonetheless hungry for enterprise.” The producer was headquartered in Singapore, whereas their surface-mount provider, which put elements immediately onto printed circuit boards, was in Batam, Indonesia.

Staff assemble Fitbits by hand in October of 2008. James Park

Working with that producer, Park and Friedman made some tweaks within the design of the circuitry and the form of the case. They struggled over the best way to hold water—and sweat—out of the machine, selecting ultrasonic welding for the case and including a spray-on coating for the circuitry after some gadgets had been returned with corrosion on the electronics. That required tweaking the structure to verify the coating would get between the chips. The coating on every circuit board needed to be checked and touched up by hand. Once they realized that the coating elevated the peak of the chips, they needed to tweak the structure some extra.

In December 2009, only a week earlier than the ship date, Fitbits started rolling off the manufacturing line.

“I used to be in a resort room in Singapore testing one of many first totally built-in gadgets,” Park says. “And it wasn’t syncing to my pc. Then I put the machine proper subsequent to the bottom station, and it began to sync. Okay, that’s good, however what was the utmost distance it might sync? And that turned out to be actually only a few inches. In each different check we had completed, it was high quality. It might sync from 15 or 20 ft [5 or 6 meters] away.”

The issue, Park finally discovered, occurred when the 2 halves of the Fitbit case had been ultrasonically welded collectively. In earlier syncing checks, the instances had been left unsealed. The sealing course of pushed the halves nearer collectively, in order that the cable for the show touched or practically touched the antenna printed on the circuit board, which affected the radio sign. Park tried squeezing the halves collectively on an unsealed unit and reproduced the issue.

Getting the primary technology of Fitbits into mass manufacturing required some last-minute troubleshooting. Fitbit cofounder James Park [top, standing in center] helps debug a tool on the producer shortly earlier than the product’s 2009 launch. Early models from the manufacturing line are proven partially assembled [bottom]. James Park

“I assumed, if we might simply push that cable away from the antenna, we’d be okay,” Park mentioned. “The one factor I might discover in my resort room to do this was bathroom paper. So I rolled up some bathroom paper actually tight and shoved it in between the cable and the antenna. That appeared to work, although I wasn’t actually assured.”

Park went to the manufacturing facility the following day to debate the issue—and his answer—with the manufacturing group. They refined his repair—changing the bathroom paper with a tiny slice of froth—and that’s how the primary technology of Fitbits shipped.

Fitbit’s quick evolution

The corporate bought about 5,000 of these $99 first-generation models in 2009, and greater than 10 occasions that quantity in 2010. The rollout wasn’t completely easy. Casciola remembers that Fitbit’s logistics heart was sending him a stunning variety of corroded gadgets that had been returned by clients. Casciola’s process was to tear them down and diagnose the issue.

“One of many contacts on the machine, over time, was rising a inexperienced corrosion,” Casciola says. “However the different two contacts weren’t.” It turned out the issue got here from Casciola’s design of the system-reset set off, which allowed customers to reset the machine with out a reset button or a detachable battery. “Inevitably,” Casciola says, “firmware goes to crash. When you possibly can’t take the battery out, it’s a must to have one other method of forcing a reset; you don’t need to have somebody ready six days for the battery to expire earlier than restarting.”

The reset that Casciola designed was “a button on the charging station that you would poke with a paper clip. If you happen to did this with the tracker sitting on the charger, it might reset. In fact, we needed to have a method for the tracker to see that sign. Once I designed the circuit to permit for that, I ended up with a nominal voltage on one pin.” This low voltage was inflicting the corrosion.

“If you happen to clipped the tracker onto sweaty clothes—keep in mind, sweat has a excessive salt content material—a really tiny present would stream,” says Casciola. “It was simply fractions of a microamp, not sufficient to trigger a reset, however sufficient, over time, to trigger greenish corrosion.”

Cofounders Eric Friedman [left] and James Park go to Fitbit’s producer in December of 2008. James Park

On the 2012 technology of the Fitbit, known as the Fitbit One, Casciola added a brand new sort of chip, one which hadn’t been out there when he was engaged on the unique design. It allowed the only button to set off a reset when it was held down for some seconds whereas the machine was sitting on the charger. That eradicated the necessity for the lively pin.

The charging interface was the supply of one other early downside. Within the preliminary design, the trim of the Fitbit’s plastic casing was painted with chrome. “We initially needed an precise steel trim,” Friedman says, “however that interfered with the radio sign.”

Chrome wasn’t an excellent alternative both. “It brought on issues with the charger interface,” Park provides. “We needed to do a whole lot of work to forestall shorting there.”

They dropped the chrome after some tens of hundreds of models had been shipped—after which acquired compliments from purchasers in regards to the new, chrome-less look.

Evolution occurred shortly, significantly in the best way the machine transmitted information. In 2012, when Bluetooth LE grew to become extensively out there as a brand new low-power communications customary, the bottom station was changed by a small Bluetooth communications dongle. And finally the dongles disappeared altogether.

“We had an enormous debate about whether or not or to not hold delivery that dongle,” Park says. “Its value was vital, and should you had a current iPhone, you didn’t want it. However we didn’t need somebody shopping for the machine after which returning it as a result of their cellphone couldn’t join.” The group carefully tracked the penetration price of Bluetooth LE in cellphones; after they felt that quantity was excessive sufficient, they killed off the dongle.

Fitbit’s wrist-ward migration

After a number of iterations of the unique Fitbit design, typically known as the “clip” for its form, the health tracker moved to the wrist. This wasn’t a matter of merely redesigning the best way the machine connected to the physique however a rethinking of algorithms.

The impetus got here from some customers’ need to raised observe their sleep. The Fitbit’s algorithms allowed it to establish sleep patterns, a design alternative that, Park says, “was pivotal, as a result of it modified the machine from being simply an exercise tracker to an all-day wellness tracker.” However nightclothes didn’t supply apparent spots for attachment. So the Fitbit shipped with a skinny cloth wristband meant to be used simply at evening. Customers started asking buyer assist if they might hold the wristband on across the clock. The reply was no; Fitbit’s step-counting algorithms on the time didn’t assist that.

“My father, who turned 80 on July 5, is fixated on his step rely. From 11 at evening till midnight, he’s within the parking storage, going up flights of stairs. And he’s in higher form than I ever keep in mind him.” —Eric Friedman

In the meantime, a cultural phenomenon was underway. Within the mid-2000s, yellow
Livestrong bracelets, made out of silicone and bought to assist most cancers analysis, had been abruptly all over the place. Different causes and actions jumped on the development with their very own brightly coloured wristbands. By early 2013, Fitbit and its rivals Nike and Jawbone had launched wrist-worn health trackers in roughly the identical fashion as these fashionable bracelets. Fitbit’s model was known as the Flex, as soon as once more designed by NewDealDesign.

A no-button consumer interface for the Fitbit Flex

The Flex’s interface was even easier than the unique Fitbit’s one button and OLED display: It had no buttons and no display, simply 5 LEDs organized in a row and a vibrating motor. To alter modes, you tapped on the floor.

“We didn’t need to substitute individuals’s watches,” Park says. The know-how wasn’t but able to “construct a compelling machine—one which had a giant display and the compute energy to drive actually superb interactions on the wrist that will be worthy of that display. The know-how developments didn’t converge to make that doable till 2014 or 2015.”

The Fitbit Flex [right], the primary Fitbit designed to be worn on the wrist, was launched in 2013. It had no buttons and no display. Customers managed it by tapping; 5 LEDs indicated progress towards a step rely chosen by way of an app [left]. iStock

“The quantity of stuff the group was in a position to convey with simply the LEDs was superb,” Friedman remembers. “The standing of the place you’re in the direction of reaching your [step] objective, that’s apparent. However [also] the lights biking to indicate that it’s trying to find one thing, the vibrating whenever you hit your step objective, issues like that.”

The faucet a part of the interface, although, was “presumably one thing we didn’t get completely proper,” Park concedes. It took a lot fine-tuning of algorithms after the launch to raised type out what was
not tapping—like applauding. Much more vital, some customers couldn’t fairly intuit the suitable method to faucet.

“If it really works for 98 p.c of your customers, however you’re rising to tens of millions of customers, 2 p.c actually begins including up,” Park says. They introduced the button again for the following technology of Fitbit gadgets.

And the remainder is historical past

In 2010, its first full yr available on the market, the Fitbit bought some 50,000 models. Fitbit gross sales peaked in 2015, with nearly 23 million gadgets bought that yr, in response to
Statista. Since then, there’s been a little bit of a drop-off, as multifunctional sensible watches have come down in value and grown in recognition and Fitbit knockoffs entered the market. In 2021, Fitbit nonetheless boasted greater than 31 million lively customers, in response to Market.us.Media. And Fitbit might now be using the development again to simplicity, as individuals discover themselves desirous to eliminate distractions and transfer again to easier gadgets. I see this taking place in my circle of relatives: My smartwatch-wearing daughter traded in that wearable for a Fitbit Cost 6 earlier this yr.

Fitbit went public in 2015 at a valuation of $4.1 billion. In 2021 Google accomplished its $2.1 billion buy of the corporate and absorbed it into its {hardware} division. In April of this yr, Park and Friedman left Google. Early retirement? Hardly. The 2, now age 47, have began a brand new firm that’s at the moment in stealth mode.

The thought of encouraging individuals to be lively by electronically monitoring steps has had endurance.

“My father, who turned 80 on July 5, is fixated on his step rely,” Friedman says. “From 11 at evening till midnight, he’s within the parking storage, going up flights of stairs. And he’s in higher form than I ever keep in mind him.”

What might be a greater reward than that?