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Evolution of Digital Wellness
Evolution of Digital Wellness

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Trends shaping the Mental health and wellness Industry.

The concept of wellness has become a key focus area for global healthcare industry. According to recent estimates the global wellness market is worth more than $1.5T and has been seeing an annual growth of above 5% driven by rise in consumers’ interests and purchasing power. Together with this, the wellness industry is becoming increasingly crowded which is creating the need for innovative strategies aimed at maintaining competitive advantages. There is also a greater shift towards services like counselling, training etc. which emphasize on wholistic mental and physical wellness.

Today, the major trends that are being seen in the mental health and wellness industry include

  1. Mass personalization: customers are more inclined to prioritize personalization now than they would have until a few years back, even though data privacy is still a concern. Organizations are now able to precisely target consumer segments based on their interest levels through customized storytelling and messaging leveraging personalized marketing. This is also reflecting in the product road map. A prime example can be the manner in which fitness tech companies collect physiological data to provide personalized fitness and sleep analytics to the users.
  2. Growth in services: There has been a growth in offerings in terms of experiences for both physical and mental wellbeing. Although products are still the critical part of the segment, services are acting as an enhancement in the wellbeing space. Fitness organizations are extending their offerings through providing of virtual communities or connected devices. There has been democratization in the healthcare segment through digital consultations and remote care. There are more developments envisaged in the hybrid healthcare space, Covid 19 has certainly acted as an accentuator in this regard. Various estimates say that there has been an increase in the usage of services related to telehealth to the tune of 38% since the Covid pandemic began. Both the patients and healthcare players understand the potential for digital healthcare tools. In the year 2020 alone above 90,000 apps related to digital health have been added to the top application stores globally (Averaging 250 new apps every day!)
  3. Focus on Mental health: Mental health is an important part of overall wellbeing. Living in a state of trauma deserves further space in conversations both individually and on digital forms. There is also a rise in demand for online consultations on mental health. Organizations have stepped in to help provide more mindfulness, better quality of sleep, therapy meetings and so on along with helping reduce taboo or stigma associated with these. Research estimates point out that during the pandemic somewhere around a quarter of the global workforce have faced mental health challenges like depression. This has resulted in the sprouting of multiple support groups related to counselling, depression, prevention of suicide and anxiety etc.
  4. Digital Wellness prioritization by employers: Wellbeing is not limited to individuals only but has become a significant area of focus for modern businesses. CEOs do understand that engagement and productivity at work has a direct relation with wellbeing.  Meditation rooms, digital health subscriptions, environments that have biophilic designs are some of the most visible changes. Employers are focusing on improving wellness within the digital workplace through addressing concerns like information overload, application overload, digital noise pollution etc. Employers are increasing emphasis on overall wellbeing tools like meditation apps, sleep or fitness applications and software for task management. Thus employers are increasingly supporting employees’ work life balance.

The swing to digital channels is happening at the rapidity of ‘a decade in days’.  Traditional channels may hold for certain categories of products like multivitamins, fortified foods, skin care but other categories of products and services like fitness wearables, wellbeing applications are going to be online. Key markets are seen to be USA, China, Japan, Brazil, and Europe.

Traditional industry and transformations

The traditional aspects of wellness involved physical wellness only which included the inclination towards physical activities, unwinding and heathy living. This also included development, maintenance of a social support system and financial wellness. Today the paradigm has changed or improved with wellness involving psychological as well as emotional wellness. The stress in life that has crept in due to a demanding work culture, complexities in relationships, need for knowledge expansion all are impacting wellness in various levels thus creating need for all the more initiatives and solutions that people are searching for in areas like occupational or spiritual wellness. (Link with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) The needs which have an impact at a safety and physiological level has been typically taken care of by Physical wellness solutions. Psychological and emotional wellness products and solutions today cater to the individual needs that are related to friendship and family, freedom or even individual’s requirements of a sense of connection etc.

Areas of focus for data driven transformation

The ideal state of personal fulfilment, health and social satisfaction that can be achieved by technology is known as Digital Wellness. This is a way of life wherein individuals are able to lead their lives through better leveraging of natural communities as well as digital communities by using technology. The trend today focuses on long term customer engagement & individuality. Earlier approach of lone measurement of utilization does not work today and must be clubbed with customer retention, engagement and customer loyalty metrics. Infusing the characteristics of equity, diversity, inclusion and belongingness into the solutions would help the customers to find out products and services that are clinically and culturally a good fit. Designing global solutions must require inclusion of culture and language specific factors s well for the serviceable market.

Service providers have started to invest in these research based new age solutions:

  1. Advanced Teletherapy: Technology has updated the way psychological help is delivered. Software support and scheduling applications have paved the way for broader adoption of Teletherapy. These solutions can supplement traditional wellness and mental health related treatments.
  2. New tools that can address new age stressors: Remote learning and working, societal and environmental issues, higher pace of organizational innovation are the new stress factors. Newer tools must focus on improving empathy and help create continuous improvement space. These can have ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ components to it. Hard components can include learning courses and platforms, increasing awareness as well as participation in wellness related products. Soft elements can help employees work on activities that matter to them like social causes.
  3. Gamification: This will help consumers to raise their expectations. Gamification approach would help individuals to be more accountable along with driving towards desired goals. Activities like scorekeeping would also help to motivate customers to take daily actions often resulting in building newer habits. For instance, a leading smartphone manufacturer nudging its users to stand once every hour.
  4. Digital biomarker applications: These can be used in tandem with smartphones and is very useful in the collection of psychological data. Attributes like heartbeat or temperature that is captured on wearables can be useful in tracking wellbeing. Apart from this data collected by the biomarkers and wearables can be analyzed via analytics which could be instrumental in identification of people who maybe at risk.


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Senior Market Research Analyst

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