The research firm cautions, however, that the growth of wearable devices won’t keep pace—with wearable device shipments reaching 135 million units in 2019, less than three times the 50 million units shipped in 2013. The discrepancy results from each wearable incorporating an average of 4.1 sensor elements in 2019 vs. 1.4 in 2013.
If wearables are to meet or exceed such forecasts, they may have some growing up to do. In a Nov. 27 New York Times “Room for Debate” section titled “Is wearable tech destined to fail?” Bridget Carey, a senior editor at CNET, writes that wearables are going through their “awkward teenage years,” where many devices “collect data and bombard us with alerts.”
Eva Chen, editor of the personal-style magazine Lucky, counters arguments that women won’t adopt wearables for reasons of fashion. Michael Kors, she writes in the Times, built a women’s-wear empire around large men’s-inspired watches. She hopes collaboration between tech companies and fashion designers will result in wearables that “balance elegant form with functionality that you just can’t live without.”
In contrast, Ben Bajarin, a principal analyst at Creative Strategies, writes in the Times that for wearables (fashionable or otherwise) “to truly take off, they need to disappear and become embedded into the apparel we already wear”—including sensors in our shoes to count steps and in our shirts to monitor heart rate. In this he echoes cellphone pioneer Martin Cooper who wants to see cellphones disassembled, with sensors distributed across the body.
Of course, consumers—fashion-conscious or otherwise—aren’t the only potential users of wearable technology. Pierre Theodore, a lung surgeon at the University of California San Francisco, concludes the “Room for Debate” section by noting that although smart glasses, for example, will require considerable evolution, they might ultimately provide doctors with hands-free access to data in a hospital setting. The same should be true of other professions as well.
Other news suggests that the “considerable evolution” Dr. Theodore wants to see is underway. The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel will provide chips for future generations of Google Glass and work with hospitals and manufacturers to develop new applications, but Google will continue to work on consumer applications.
Beyond fashion and function, wearables present additional challenges that will need to be worked out. The data they collect could be hacked, sold to marketers (which may be legal under license agreements that end users seldom read), or even subpoenaed.
Kate Crawford, a visiting professor at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and a senior fellow at NYU’s Information Law Institute, reports in the Atlantic that a court case involving Fitbit data is already underway. The plaintiff wants to use the data, as interpreted by analytics company Vivametrica, to show that she suffers from low activity levels for a person of her age and profession as a result of a personal injury four years ago.
In this case, the plaintiff is using her own data in support of her claim, but it’s easy to see that an insurance company, for example, could use such data to deny a disability claim, or a prosecutor could use it to challenge an alibi.
Wearables will inexorably grow up, offering us our choice of fashion and functionality. But it behooves us to beware of the potential consequences of storing vast amounts of wearable-derived personal data in the cloud.
Rick Nelson, Executive Editor