Under Armour Quietly Shelves its Consumer mHealth Wearables Platform

One of the early participants in the mHealth wearables movement is quietly pulling out.

Under Armour, which had competed alongside the likes of Apple, Fitbit, Garmin and Withings with a connected health platform that included an app, mHealth wearables and a smart scale, recently removed its UA Record app from both Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

The company has urged users to migrate data to the MyFitnessPal App, which it had acquired in 2015, but that platform doesn’t collect data on sleep, steps, weight or resting heart rate – only calories burned during exercise.

The moves put an end to the HealthBox program, launched in 2016 amid the connected health fanfare that saw huge interest in digital health and wellness and a fast-growing consumer wearables market at the CES show in Las Vegas.

At the height of that activity, Under Armour and IBM announced a partnership to embed the latter’s Watson cognitive computing technology in the UA Record mHealth platform, giving users access to personalized coaching and resources based on their sleep, fitness, activity and nutrition data. There were also rumors that the company was developing a line of sensor-embedded clothing, including hats and headbands.

“When it comes to digital health and fitness tracking, the past ten years have been about data collection,” Kevin Plank, Under Armour’s founder and CEO, said in a press release. “We’re now at a point where a shift is occurring and consumers are demanding more from this information. This partnership will allow us to provide value back to the consumer in an unprecedented way, as we integrate IBM Watson’s machine learning technology with the robust data from Under Armour’s Connected Fitness community - the world’s largest digital health and fitness community of more than 160 million members.”

Flash forward three years, and that growth hasn’t come as expected. The market has since shifted toward more integrated mHealth wearables like smartwatches. One competitor, Withings, merged with Nokia for a while to form Nokia Digital Health, before company founder Eric Carreel bought back the brand in 2018 and refocused on mHealth products.