Nokia’s Health Observatory Shares some Fascinating Data
Nokia is a leader in the Health and Wellness space. After acquiring France’s Health Company Withings in 2016 Nokia is now involved in the sale of digital scales, fitness tracking watches and blood pressure cuffs (to name a few). Nokia has had their challenges with the Digital Health Market since the acquisition. One great thing that Nokia has shared with the world is their Nokia Health Institute. This organization focuses on learning from real world patient collected data.
The Nokia Health Observatory has shared their insights from reviewing 100,000 users and provided the data in an anonymized form. The Observatory website contains pages of charts, infographics and fun cocktail party trivia for the US, FR, UK and BE. The four health categories they are focused on are physical activity, body mass (BMI), blood pressure and sleep.
Let’s review some of the most interesting tidbits that Nokia has shared.
Want to see someone increase their health through walking? Watch the over 50 year old crowd boost their steps by an average of 12% in the first year. Younger folks were averaging closer to an 8% increase in steps.
Looking at people who are sleep deprived then placing those individual into different weight categories by body mass is telling. Not only the US, but also the UK have similar numbers for this. Nearly a ~20% difference in sleep deprivation for a morbidly obese person when compared to a person of normal weight. 
Wait, what happened here? The percentage of overweight people in the US has been increasing by an average of .7% over the last seven years. What is causing this kind of rise? Considering that the US spends $147 billion each year on obesity related medical costs this steady increase is concerning. Excess weight is one of the top five culprits for early mortality.
I guess congratulations are in order for New York State. According to Nokia’s data NY has the lowest number of overweight and obese adults. New York is still 56.9% overweight.
Nokia’s Blood Pressure Cuff is a really slick device. It pumps itself up, syncs the results right to a phone and is trivial to use. When the Observatory compared body mass categories to people with high blood pressure the results were dramatic. 51.9% of the people in the morbid obesity category had high blood pressure while only 8.4% in the normal weight category did.
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