Healthcare Social Media: What Can We Learn from a Fork? Or 8 Reasons for Slow Control to Succeed.

In the first few days of the New Year, we are always smothered in summaries, insights, and perspectives on the year past and the trends to come, especially in the fast-moving area of digital communication.  What and who will succeed on the web, in Social Media, in Mobile Apps? What's going up? What's coming down? You get the picture. But, to my mind, there is only one question? When will healthcare "get it" in a major and concrete way?  When will digital healthcare play as much of a role in as many people's lives as say e-commerce ? The answer is Marketing 101: when what people want, the products, and the business models are aligned. We aren't there yet.

Where I'm going with this, is that some innovations do speed forward with less effort than others. And herein lies my story about the potential success of Slow Control, a company -- which in all transparency has been a client since 2012. Their first product, a digital fork branded as the HapiFork, has been unveiled at the Las Vegas Consumer Show. This fork vibrates when the user eats faster than he's supposed to and it generates graphs of the user's eating speed. Why set up such a system? Because eating too fast is unhealthy and conversely "eating slowly" has various health benefits on digestion, metabolism, weight management.

We are seeing an extraordinary amount of interest in this internet-connected fork, the concept of "eating slowly for better health" which it supports, and the story of the inventor, Jacques Lépine. Journalists and bloggers are very present. The exhibit stand is never empty.

And so, we ask ourselves "why this one"? What are the lessons learned? Here is my take. My theory is that Slow Control is capturing everyone's imagination for a number of reasons.

1. A fork used for eating is an important and ancient tool going back to the Egyptians and Romans. 
2. It is something that everyone  likes, because it means that serious food is not far away. 
3. A fork is a three-dimensional object that everyone can easily visualize.
4. Eating is one of the most positive human activities that people can discuss and food, unending in our interest.
5. Eating too fast is something that almost everyone thinks they're guilty of at least occasionally.
6. The concept of the fork has not had a major technological innovation, since perhaps the introduction of plastic, and none as significant as the integration of electronics.
7. The application of the quantified self approach to the fork is a mindbender. Everyone knows that we can count and graph our steps, calories consumed, weight gained, heart rate, and blood pressure. But no one even knows how many forkfuls we take a day, let alone how to record them.
8. A new entrant (Slow Control) to the market has brought all of this together in one product and the interest skyrockets...

Generating buzz is  "not simple" as all that. Look at how many valid public health campaigns have failed to interested the consumer. But, develop a way to measure for the first time an important human activity, and as such transform a historic object...and you're bound to stir things up...It's not about trends in general. It's about what makes us tick...Hey, we can count that too.