The exasperated-sounding headline is from this Pando story:
At last, a report on wearable technology that doesn’t throw out some
exorbitant but vaguely calculated projection of how much the market will
be worth in five years as proof of how excited we should be.
The Future of Biosensing Wearables report out today from Rock Health
– a San Francisco-based fund working with digital health technologies –
forgoes such carry-on, and is maybe the first of its type to address
the growing consumer suspicion alongside the new market possibilities.
Rock Health spent 15 months looking at the sector which, as it points
out, will be worth anywhere between five and fifty billion dollars by
2018, going by any of the nine major pieces of research conducted
recently.
Despite the big talk, the activity tracker market is the only
wearables space to have any penetration of note, with a still measly one
to two percent market share. Fitbit, Jawbone and Nike’s bands account
for 97 percent of sales, and 80 percent of people stop using an activity
tracker after six months, according to Rock Health’s estimates.
We’ve a long way to go until the promised land. Nike fired its
Fuelband team. Nobody likes smart watches. The form that wearable
technology will take in our future is up for debate. It used to be
considered as a post-mobile replacement. Now who knows? Somebody needs
to make a product people want to buy before any more bold proclamations
are set down.
That said, according to Rock Health’s report, there is a confluence
of underlying factors that will carry the space along and help it find
its footing. Investment in sensors and smart devices exploded from $49
million in 2011 to $282 million in 2013. Supporting this increase in
investment is an upsurge in technology: increased smartphone
penetration, drastic decreases in the per unit price of accelerometers
since 2008, cloud computing, wireless charging, and Bluetooth
capabilities. A lot of what is happening now wouldn’t have been possible
even three years ago....MORE
