The global wearables market is expected to be worth more than $67 billion by 2024, according to Market Watch.
In December 2019, the global market for wearables was on track to ship 305.2 million units, up 71.4% from the 178 million units shipped in 2018, the International Data Corporation (IDC) reported.
From there, total volumes will grow to 489.1 million units in 2023, resulting in a compound annual growth rate of 22.4%, according to IDC.
"Wearables encompasses all the leading categories of things people wear to solve certain problems," said Raj Bhakta, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Funxion Wear.
Fitness and health tracking had primarily been limited to medical use-cases until now, Dr. Bhakta said.
"The first wave of wearables came out of purely steps tracking," he said. "The prominent form factors were wrist-worn devices or clip-on devices with accelerometers.
"As the market began to expand and consumers began to want more out of their trackers, optical heart-rate sensors began to be incorporated," Dr. Bhakta continued. "This expanded the market even further through the likes of category leaders such as Fitbit, Jawbone, Misfit, and other companies.
"The main drivers of growth have been the mega-trends around connectivity, health & wellness, and the incentives being pushed by health insurance companies to enhance patient well-being and decrease lifetime patient costs due to chronic diseases," Dr. Bhakta added.
One of the key markets for wearables is the health and wellness sector, he said.
"We are entering the next wave of wearables that solve problems of patient compliance, the need for continuous physical and mental health monitoring, and the need for signal accuracy for clinical decision making," Dr. Bhakta said. "Given the adoption of wrist-worn and ear-worn devices, health tracking will become as ubiquitous as voice interfaces are today. This will take some time given that medical technologies need clinical validation before adoption occurs and the product, sales, and adoption cycles are more rigorous and longer than say the direct-to-consumer market."
The other key market that is growing incredibly fast is the hearables market, he added.
Smartwatches and ear-worn devices will account for more than 70% of all wearable shipments by 2023, per IDC.
In December 2019, the IDC said 69.3 million smartwatches would ship that year and total volumes are expected to reach 109.2 million units worldwide in 2023.
“Hearables or ear-worn devices have been around as well but now are gaining more prominence due to the infrastructure of audio content and voice interfaces being used ubiquitously,” Bhakta said.
“Audio content is known for its incredible adoption rate, a ready marketplace of content creators, and the density of information it can relay,” Dr. Bhakta continued. “If we go back to when the first radio channels were first introduced, it was a breakthrough technology that transformed the fabric of society. Today, given the rise of podcasts, music, audiobooks, and the need for hands-free communication, hearables have gained widespread adoption.”
Dr. Bhakta sees augmented reality wearables – such as smart glasses – as the next trend.
However, “The technology-stack to enable this to occur is incredibly complex and the infrastructure must be developed as well,” he said. “The pipelines are being built via real-time streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, and others.
“The most adopted product will have the best design, user-experience, technology reliability and media content infrastructure embedded,” he continued. “There are also industrial use-cases for increasing manufacturing and operational efficiencies that are being adopted as well. Digital therapeutics via virtual reality headsets is another use-case that is having some success.”
These markets are still in their early stages, Dr. Bhakta noted,
“We are witnessing some specific ‘printed/flexible/stretchable electronics’ based technologies being introduced into the marketplace,” Dr. Bhakta added, “but they have to be at cost-parity, performance-parity and have the same user-experience as the current form-factors to gain widespread adoption.”
He reported "some exciting products coming out in the continuous glucose monitoring and continuous electrocardiogram monitoring space positioned towards medical-grade health monitoring."
According to Dr. Bhakta, the smart clothing market has largely remained niche and not as widespread in adoption "mainly due to a confluence of factors involving user-needs, manufacturing scalability, and product performance."
He expects this market to emerge as the next wave of health wearables "but it is most likely 5-10 years too early for the average consumer."
"There are some exciting use-cases, however, as it relates to medical-grade monitoring that is gaining market adoption, so this is definitely a space to keep tabs on if you're looking at the intersection of a trillion-dollar market, a form-factor that allows for widespread adoption, and a form-factor that allows for continuous medical-grade data."
The benefits of wearable technology include health monitoring.
Devices can detect such things as the development of a chronic ailment, such as a heart attack, Dr. Bhakta said.
"In the world of preventative medicine, it is paramount to know this information, especially if you're a health insurance company or caregiver," he said. "Most of the healthcare burden is from a small subset of the population and this target demographic usually is not properly equipped with mainstream technologies of wearables. Thus, the product, sales, and business strategy have to be largely different from direct-to-consumer wearables which typically cater to high-income quantified self customers."
As communication transitions from touch to voice, the next wave of voice apps will be "coming in full force," according to Dr. Bahkta.
The market is ripe for widespread adoption in the next 3 years, he said.
"As for augmented and virtual reality," he continued, "there's limited market adoption mainly due to the fact that the market is just reaching critical mass for widespread adoption. It's most likely 2-4 years too early for this segment of wearables."
Examples of wearable devices include caps, beanies, headbands, smart fabrics, glasses, watches and jewelry, Market Watch noted.
Some wearables that use flexible and printed electronics that consumers might recognize include BeBop Sensors’ Forte Data Gloves – the recipient of TIME’s Best Inventions 2018 Award – Fitbit and the Apple Watch.
"The most popular products have been skin-patches that measure one's electrocardiogram or other biomarkers such as glucose," Dr. Bhakta said. "The bottleneck, however, has been the fact that flexible and printed electronics are still a nascent technology in search of a problem to solve.
"The current solutions in the marketplace have been 'good enough' in solving market problems [however it] will also take some time for the market to pull highly accurate solutions," he noted.
The best use-case for flexible and printed electronics remains in continuous health monitoring with medical-grade accuracy, according to Dr. Bhakta.
“However,” he cautioned, “it will take time for the right combination of business models, use-cases, and technology-stack of soft-to-hard electronics to meet this goal.
"Battery life is a big issue as well as the size of the sensor arrays and the associated data acquisition units," Dr. Bhakta said.
MarketsandMarkets said the industry must address the power requirement and manage power consumption and recharging of batteries as there is "an absence of reliable and efficient battery system that could be easily worn without compromising on the compactness and ease of use of the device."
"This has always been a longstanding bottleneck," Dr. Bhakta said.
"Other approaches in the market include NFC-embedded patches or clothing that allows for intermittent monitoring," he added. "There are also other use-cases for flexible and printed electronics within the fashion and automotive sectors that are non-wearable that are emerging."