Tracking your health one wearable at a time
According to Juniper Research (http://www.juniperresearch.com/research/smart-wearable-devices-report), 27 million units of wearable devices will be sold by the end of the year. The market is said to be worth $ 7.1 billion by 2015.
It’s also highly possible that in the foreseeable future, people could walk into doctor’s appointments along with their Fitbits, Nike Fuel Bands or Google Glasses and provide wealth of data about their lifestyles to their physicians. Here’s a look at some fitness & health wearables that are likely to disrupt the market substantially in the near future:
Apple Watch
It perhaps comes as no surprise that one of the main drivers of the wearables bandwagon is Apple. The company has taken further steps to incorporate fitness and health into its parameters by introducing its new platform – HealthKit. With HealthKit it can not only track your fitness but also send the data directly to your healthcare providers. When teamed up with the Apple Watch, which is soon to enter the market, it is likely to turn Apple Watch from yet another gadget into a product that could revolutionalise the healthcare industry.
Microsoft’s mystery launch
According to a wave of reports hitting the internet, Microsoft will soon be entering the highly competitive wearables market with its own fitness related offering. This new wearable is slated to track a person’s heart rate and also work across several mobile platforms. The fact Microsoft is entering the market rather late might work against the company, but given that the smartwatch can function across mobile platforms could give it a leg up. It is also said to boast a two-day battery life.
Samsung
Compared to many others in the market, Samsung entered the industry early enough to make an impact with consumers. In 2014, Young Sohn, President and Chief Strategy Officer for Samsung Electronics’ Device Solutions, said, “There is a tremendous opportunity at the intersection of health and technology. This is the single greatest opportunity of our generation.” The company has introduced a concept called Simband, which it believes is what every wearable ought to be, even though it isn’t a product yet. According to Samsung, Simband can gather diagnostically relevant data from the heart rate to the skin’s electrical conductivity. Whether it will be able to roll out such a product is yet to be seen.
Rejiva
It’s a recent product introduced by a small Pittsburg based start-up called Rijuven. It’s an FDA approved product that one wears on the chest and will help measure everything from number of steps a user takes, to number of hours of sleep they get in a day, and monitor all the vital signs including respiratory rate and ECG. The product is still in development. Such wearables from start-ups could very well upset the status quo set by big companies like Google, Apple and Samsung.
The bottom-line
Wearable technology is certainly something that is here to stay. However, the true success of how important it becomes to the society will depend on how these companies leverage the data collected from users and provide insight and help improve the overall health and fitness levels of the end user.
