Anthony Locicero, Associate Editor11.12.19
The worldwide market for wearable devices is forecasted to grow 15.3% over the previous year to 198.5 million units by the end of 2019, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker.
“This market is evolving as materials are being developed that enable the functionality of almost any imaginable substrate, including textiles and nonwovens,” said Beth Vasy, VP, operations, Liquid X Printed Metals.
The market is on track to reach global shipments of 222.9 million units in 2019, growing to 302.3 million units in 2023 with a CAGR of 7.9%, per IDC.
“The wearables market has grown rapidly over the last decade and consumers today have a broader selection of wearables devices that can not only collect and analyze data, but they are also beginning to predict future outcomes,” said Oxana Pantchenko, Ph.D., project manager engineering and technical lead, human monitoring for NextFlex. These wearables can be found in the fitness, wellness and healthcare sectors, as well as in safety applications in professional and consumer environments.
“The market interest keeps growing as there are multiple new areas of applications that could be addressed,” said Nicholas Skelton, marketing manager Brewer Science, Inc. “Some new health and wellness wearables such as non-invasive disposable glucose sensors, smart footwear, smart patches and exoskeletons are on the rise and are nearly in the stage of adoption.
“The main driving forces are public awareness to health and fitness, convenience in health and fitness monitoring, easy integration with smart devices (phones), and the possibility of implementing printed electronics and IoT on wearables,” he noted.
Added Jamie Orlando, Butler Technologies’ director of sales and marketing: “Material advancements have been the driver for growth.” Orlando pointed to advances in stretchable conductive inks and stretchable base materials.
“Another advancement has been TPU substrates. TPUs have been developed with integrated hot melt adhesive to be applied directly to fabrics. Two years ago... we had to screenprint the adhesive onto the substrate.”
Smartwatches and ear-worn devices will account for more than 70% of all wearable shipments by 2023, per IDC.
“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,” said Raj Bhakta, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Funxion Wear.
“Audio content is known for its incredible adoption rate, 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.”
Another market is wearable data gloves; BeBop Sensors’ Forte Data Gloves were the recipient of TIME’s Best Inventions 2018 Award.
“We are in customer trials,” said Keith McMillen, the company’s founder and CEO. “Production samples are being shipped and the applications within various sub-markets are growing quite well.”
The gloves are “targeted at applications associated with headsets, ranging from entertainment to enterprise training,” McMillen said. “We are seeing traction in the broad industrial space where customers are deploying our data gloves in training within the manufacturing, automotive and medical sectors.”
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.”
While wearable devices such as fitness trackers, mobile EKG devices and video game gesture control devices are already in the market, Skelton said there are still challenges as wearables utilizing printed electronics begin to move into commercialization.
“Challenges such as long-term durability and operation in extreme conditions exist,” he said. “People do not usually wear a jacket for a decade, but the quest for electronics in this form factor to last long-term is still in people’s minds. We see high value in critical data applications that are low profile and conformal, which fit the wearable products model, but there are still some challenges in reliability (accuracy and drift), and manufacturing yield.”
“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.”
Vasy mentioned five key areas: integration, interaction/communication, practicality, connection and scalability.
“With the introduction of any new material or technology, engineers have to design to meet the application needs given the properties of the new material,” she said. “It takes time for that adjustment to take place and also to explore what new technology can be enabled by the new materials.
Dr. Pantchenko pointed to another issue: regulations.
“As wearable devices make their significant headway into the healthcare market, some of them will be considered medical devices that must comply with FDA regulatory requirements,” she said. “As is commonly understood, the new medical devices would have to be as good as or better than existing medical devices already on the market.”
BeBop’s gloves are being used in the medical field, McMillen said.
“Our customers are currently using simulations to train their new employees on various manufacturing processes; surgical procedures in the medical industry; and in better/more efficient manufacturing and assembly in automotive,” he said. “With our Forte Data Gloves, we enable doctors to train on surgical procedures [and] factory workers to train on product assembly and learn to use sophisticated and expensive equipment. This is not just to experience the work environment, but to train safely, provide feedback on the learning and ensure greater success.”
Health monitoring is a top benefit of wearables.
“Wearable technology products offer us the ability to track our fitness and health level in real-time with much more convenience and portability,” Skelton said. “Heart rate monitoring, calorie burn rate during exercise or physical activity can be monitored on our smartphones by syncing these wearables to our smart devices.”
“The common goal of wearable devices is to improve lives,” Dr. Pantchenko said.
The best use-case for flexible and printed electronics remains in continuous health monitoring with medical-grade accuracy, according to Dr. Bhakta.
“However,” he said, “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.”
Work is needed regarding battery life, he and Orlando both pointed out.
“Over the next few years, we expect to see expanded capabilities of wearables devices,” Dr. Pantchenko said. “As the number of users of wearable devices grows, and with the rapid expansion of data collected, we see the next big advancement being in data science where new algorithms can routinely and accurately deliver predictive outcomes for consumers.”
“Printing on flexible and stretchable materials offers flexibility, stretchability, and conformity that are required on a wearable product,” Skelton said. “As the wearables market grows, people are going to want to have smaller, faster and more durable devices.
“Printed electronics can produce smaller and faster devices today, but we still need to work on durability for certain applications like a fitness tracker where the user may be sweating and moving the device around all day,” he continued.
“Different materials can be made to a printable form to accommodate the desired capabilities of a particular sensor type such as temperature and moisture. Therefore, we expect more wearable products in the future that use printed sensors, circuits and electronics,” Skelton said. “There are still many needs yet to be addressed, and we feel that approaching this from a materials and electronics design standpoint is key. This gives the market the ability to choose from custom solutions that bring actionable data in a seamless manner.”
“Biometric monitoring for athletes is here now,” Orlando added. “This will become more and more prevalent among professional athletes and professional teams as they look for an advantage. It’s going to be the new ‘Moneyball’ for professional teams looking for an advantage.”
“This market is evolving as materials are being developed that enable the functionality of almost any imaginable substrate, including textiles and nonwovens,” said Beth Vasy, VP, operations, Liquid X Printed Metals.
The market is on track to reach global shipments of 222.9 million units in 2019, growing to 302.3 million units in 2023 with a CAGR of 7.9%, per IDC.
“The wearables market has grown rapidly over the last decade and consumers today have a broader selection of wearables devices that can not only collect and analyze data, but they are also beginning to predict future outcomes,” said Oxana Pantchenko, Ph.D., project manager engineering and technical lead, human monitoring for NextFlex. These wearables can be found in the fitness, wellness and healthcare sectors, as well as in safety applications in professional and consumer environments.
“The market interest keeps growing as there are multiple new areas of applications that could be addressed,” said Nicholas Skelton, marketing manager Brewer Science, Inc. “Some new health and wellness wearables such as non-invasive disposable glucose sensors, smart footwear, smart patches and exoskeletons are on the rise and are nearly in the stage of adoption.
“The main driving forces are public awareness to health and fitness, convenience in health and fitness monitoring, easy integration with smart devices (phones), and the possibility of implementing printed electronics and IoT on wearables,” he noted.
Added Jamie Orlando, Butler Technologies’ director of sales and marketing: “Material advancements have been the driver for growth.” Orlando pointed to advances in stretchable conductive inks and stretchable base materials.
“Another advancement has been TPU substrates. TPUs have been developed with integrated hot melt adhesive to be applied directly to fabrics. Two years ago... we had to screenprint the adhesive onto the substrate.”
Smartwatches and ear-worn devices will account for more than 70% of all wearable shipments by 2023, per IDC.
“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,” said Raj Bhakta, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Funxion Wear.
“Audio content is known for its incredible adoption rate, 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.”
Another market is wearable data gloves; BeBop Sensors’ Forte Data Gloves were the recipient of TIME’s Best Inventions 2018 Award.
“We are in customer trials,” said Keith McMillen, the company’s founder and CEO. “Production samples are being shipped and the applications within various sub-markets are growing quite well.”
The gloves are “targeted at applications associated with headsets, ranging from entertainment to enterprise training,” McMillen said. “We are seeing traction in the broad industrial space where customers are deploying our data gloves in training within the manufacturing, automotive and medical sectors.”
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.”
While wearable devices such as fitness trackers, mobile EKG devices and video game gesture control devices are already in the market, Skelton said there are still challenges as wearables utilizing printed electronics begin to move into commercialization.
“Challenges such as long-term durability and operation in extreme conditions exist,” he said. “People do not usually wear a jacket for a decade, but the quest for electronics in this form factor to last long-term is still in people’s minds. We see high value in critical data applications that are low profile and conformal, which fit the wearable products model, but there are still some challenges in reliability (accuracy and drift), and manufacturing yield.”
“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.”
Vasy mentioned five key areas: integration, interaction/communication, practicality, connection and scalability.
“With the introduction of any new material or technology, engineers have to design to meet the application needs given the properties of the new material,” she said. “It takes time for that adjustment to take place and also to explore what new technology can be enabled by the new materials.
Dr. Pantchenko pointed to another issue: regulations.
“As wearable devices make their significant headway into the healthcare market, some of them will be considered medical devices that must comply with FDA regulatory requirements,” she said. “As is commonly understood, the new medical devices would have to be as good as or better than existing medical devices already on the market.”
BeBop’s gloves are being used in the medical field, McMillen said.
“Our customers are currently using simulations to train their new employees on various manufacturing processes; surgical procedures in the medical industry; and in better/more efficient manufacturing and assembly in automotive,” he said. “With our Forte Data Gloves, we enable doctors to train on surgical procedures [and] factory workers to train on product assembly and learn to use sophisticated and expensive equipment. This is not just to experience the work environment, but to train safely, provide feedback on the learning and ensure greater success.”
Health monitoring is a top benefit of wearables.
“Wearable technology products offer us the ability to track our fitness and health level in real-time with much more convenience and portability,” Skelton said. “Heart rate monitoring, calorie burn rate during exercise or physical activity can be monitored on our smartphones by syncing these wearables to our smart devices.”
“The common goal of wearable devices is to improve lives,” Dr. Pantchenko said.
The best use-case for flexible and printed electronics remains in continuous health monitoring with medical-grade accuracy, according to Dr. Bhakta.
“However,” he said, “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.”
Work is needed regarding battery life, he and Orlando both pointed out.
“Over the next few years, we expect to see expanded capabilities of wearables devices,” Dr. Pantchenko said. “As the number of users of wearable devices grows, and with the rapid expansion of data collected, we see the next big advancement being in data science where new algorithms can routinely and accurately deliver predictive outcomes for consumers.”
“Printing on flexible and stretchable materials offers flexibility, stretchability, and conformity that are required on a wearable product,” Skelton said. “As the wearables market grows, people are going to want to have smaller, faster and more durable devices.
“Printed electronics can produce smaller and faster devices today, but we still need to work on durability for certain applications like a fitness tracker where the user may be sweating and moving the device around all day,” he continued.
“Different materials can be made to a printable form to accommodate the desired capabilities of a particular sensor type such as temperature and moisture. Therefore, we expect more wearable products in the future that use printed sensors, circuits and electronics,” Skelton said. “There are still many needs yet to be addressed, and we feel that approaching this from a materials and electronics design standpoint is key. This gives the market the ability to choose from custom solutions that bring actionable data in a seamless manner.”
“Biometric monitoring for athletes is here now,” Orlando added. “This will become more and more prevalent among professional athletes and professional teams as they look for an advantage. It’s going to be the new ‘Moneyball’ for professional teams looking for an advantage.”
