The Wearables Market

Technology analysts estimate that wearable technology is already a 3 billion to 5 billion USD market today. For instance, the professional services firm Deloitte pre-dicts wearables could be worth 3 billion USD in revenue in 2014 (Deloitte, 2014).

Gartner, the technology research and advisory firm, predicts global revenues from various wearable devices, apps and services in the fitness and personal health category alone could be 1.6 billion USD in 2014, and that this could increase to 5 billion USD by 2016 (Gartner, 2013). Over the next two to three years, industry analysts predict revenues in the wearables industry could jump to 30–50 billion USD (The Business of Fashion, 2013), although some are more conservative, claiming 74 bil-lion USD will be reached by 2024 from today’s 14 bilbil-lion USD (Harrop, Raghu, and Guillaume, 2014).

Estimates of the overall number of wearable devices being sold in 2013/2014 range between 10 and 22 million. Deloitte predicts that 10 million wearable devices could be sold in 2014 alone. Of those 10 million units, 4 million are expected to be glasses, 4 million will be fitness bands, and the remaining 2 million units will be smartwatches. By 2020, Deloitte believes more than 100 million users will be using smart glasses (Deloitte, 2014).

Cisco, however, believes that not only is the number of wearable devices sold in 2013 around 22 million, but it predicts that the number of wearable devices will skyrocket to 177 million by 2018 (Cisco, 2014). Gartner forecasts that by 2017 more than 50 percent from the mobile app interactions will be caused by wearable devices with more than 100 applications in use per person per day (Gartner, 2014).

That would mean millions more smartwatches, glasses, jewellery, and wrist gadgets entering into our work and personal lives.

Table 1. Potential estimated market in USD (various sources)

3.3. Technologies

The wearable unit consists of a wide variety of components: sensors, wearable materi-als, smart textiles, actuators, power supplies, wearable communication modules and links, control and processing units, user interface for the user, software and advanced algorithms for accumulated sensing information and decision making. Form, func-tion and user experience are the keywords that have guided designers in the electron-ics industry over the years, and similar design principles are being followed in the field of wearables (Lindholm, 2014). In the case of wearables it is mostly about the materials that customers are willing to wear for long periods of time. Designers must consider the textiles into which electronics are attached, glued or embroidered. In this section we look briefly at the two types of materials related to wearables, namely textiles and electronics.

Smart Textiles. Smart textiles, also referred to as electronic textiles, smart clothing or e-textiles, are those fabrics that are embedded with digital components. Smart tex-tiles focus on the seamless integration of textex-tiles with electronics components, such as microcontrollers, sensors, actuators. A mass producible, flexible, foldable, stretchable, washable and low-cost wearable textile fabric is usually desired.

Smart textiles use electronic components to provide, for instance, health monitor-ing, thermal regulation and ambience intelligence. Innovators in the textile industry seem to consider options to merge textiles and electronics either through adoption, integration or a combination of both. Adoption means that textiles can be utilized as a basis to either carry or embed electronics. Integration goes a step further and con-nects the materials through embroidering them together. The combination of both is about using the inherent functionalities of the new materials such as fiber-based circuits or photovoltaic fibers (Köhler, 2013). These three mixing combinations seem to be well-aligned with innovation theory moving from initial incremental stages to the substantial innovation, and finally into a radical one (see Rogers, 2003).

New fabric sensors and trackers are created to exploit the electrical properties of soft materials and advanced knitting techniques that can be seamlessly integrated in clothes to make them ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’. Smart fabric switches and circuits using

conductive yarn are currently of particular interest in the textile trade. Fibers infused with fragrant oils or vitamins offer anti-stress, calm-inducing properties. E-textiles can also electronically monitor the user’s health or state of mind through interactive wearable computers integrated into body-hugging material.

Sensors. Sensors are one of the essential components of wearable computing. The basic idea of a sensor is to monitor a person’s activity and/or health condition and act as a medium to transfer sensing information to a device with high computing power.

Several sensors can be used in wearable devices, such as light, temperature, acceler-ometers for movement, pressure sensor, and infrared sensor for motion detection.

Biometric sensors with wearable computers allow interactions between the wearable device and the wearer in biometric monitoring for personal health. These biosensors are capable of measuring significant physiological parameters like heart rate, blood pressure, body and skin temperature, oxygen saturation, respiration rate and elec-trocardiogram. How these measurements are communicated to external devices or central units for further processing will be discussed in the next section.

Wearable Communication. Communication between wearable devices is per-formed through a wireless medium. Wearable devices are attached in proximity or contact of the human body, such as a watch phone, a wearable computing device, and healthcare or monitoring devices and form a wireless body area network (WBAN), as shown in Figure 1. Previously, the communication was served by low power con-sumption services such as WLAN or RFID. However, wearable devices are now of-fering communication services in a large scale, such as Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) worn on the body.

However, wearable communication can take place within the sphere of WBAN and a Personal Area Network (PAN). The content produced or consumed by wear-able devices required the following communication requirements:

1. Communication from outside a user’s body to wearable devices 2. Communications within the body area (WBAN)

3. Communications from WBAN to PAN

Fig. 1 shows the components of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and a pos-sible communication platform.

Fig. 1. Wearable communication

WBAN consists of smart devices attached to or implanted in the body that are capa-ble of establishing a wireless communication link. Smart devices can be of two types:

sensors and actuators. The sensors are used to measure certain parameters of the human body, either externally or internally (e.g., measuring the heartbeat and body temperature). The actuators are used to take some specific actions based on received data from the sensors or through interaction with the user. Interaction with the user or other persons is performed through a personal device (e.g., PDA and smartphone) which acts as a sink for data of wireless devices. The communication between these devices can use the techniques from Wireless Sensor Networks and Ad-hoc networks.

Types of devices and their related functionalities that are required include:

1. Sensors: This node responds to and gathers data on physical stimuli, processes the data if necessary and reports this information via wireless link. It consists of several components: sensor hardware, a power unit, a processor, memory and a transmitter or transceiver.

2. Actuators: This device acts on received data from the sensors or through interac-tion with the user. The components of an actuator are similar to the sensor’s:

actuator hardware, a power unit, a processor, memory and a receiver or trans-ceiver.

3. Wireless Personal Device: This device accumulates data from the sensors and actuators, and informs the user. The components are a power unit, a proces-sor, memory and a transceiver. This device is also called a Body Control Unit (BCU), body gateway or a sink.

Power Sources: Wearable communication requires not only wireless networking of nodes but also wireless powering. The power requirements of wearable devices can be compared to high performance notebooks. Energy can be saved by reducing display sizes in wearable devices. Another way to reduce energy consumption partly is by offloading computation to a connected wireless host computer or to cloud services.

Presently, batteries are the main solution for powering most wireless devices, but un-less they can provide significant lifetime, battery replacement may be a significant deterrent to ubiquitous adoption of wearable technologies.

The variety of energy sources can be leveraged in the node’s environment, such as motion and vibration, airflow, ambient electromagnetic fields, light and infrared radiation. In the latter case, solar cells can be an effective solution. Though the trade-off lies in placement of sensor in a well-lit location, correct orientation and free from obstructions, scavenging power from vibration or body motion is a future possibility.