“While fitness and entertainment will have the greatest demand from consumers, within an enterprise environment, the demand for wearable devices will be greatest from the aviation and warehouse sectors.”
A new report from Juniper Research projects that the next-generation wearable devices market will be worth more than $1.5 billion by 2014, up from $800 million in 2012, largely driven by consumer spending on fitness and healthcare.
Juniper’s report, “Smart Wearable Devices: Fitness, Healthcare, Entertainment & Enterprise 2012-2017” identifies 2014 as the watershed year for wearable devices both in terms of rollouts and market traction.
Large influential players, such as Google and Apple, have already made key strategic moves in this sector. Both companies are active in providing platforms for mobile computing—Apple through the iPhone and Google through its Android mobile operating system.
More than half of smartphone users gather health information on their smarthphones, according to a recent study published by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. The use of wearable devices connected to those smartphones especially in the fitness and sports activities has grown rapidly in the last two years with applications such as Nike+ and Fitbit Tracker that allow data from training sessions to be uploaded and analyzed.
“With consumers embracing new technologies and form factors, wearable devices ranging from fitness accessories to heads-up displays will be more prevalent in the consumer market,” says the report’s author, Nitin Bhas. “While fitness and entertainment will have the greatest demand from consumers, within an enterprise environment, the demand for wearable devices will be greatest from the aviation and warehouse sectors.”
The report identifies the North American and Western European market as representing more than 60 percent of the global wearable device sales. It also suggests that even though the number of fitness and sports devices bought per year is higher than the number of healthcare devices sold, the health sector will be slightly larger in terms of retail value.
November 09, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-wearable_tech_market_has_rich_future.html