Major Trends in the Wearable Devices Industry

Mar 08, 2016

Over the course of the last several years there have been developments in the cross-section of how we as consumers access technology. The transformation has been rapidly building since the advent of the computer. Computers used to take up entire rooms and required massive amounts of power. However, the incredible shrinking technology has brought the computing power of the personal computer and interconnectedness of the internet to the consumer first through cell phones and now through at the level of the new-fangled wearable devices.

People can access their entire movies or music collections with a click of a button. Furthermore, portability has been emphasized in more recent developments. The growth potential is especially strong in consumer health care field in which wearable devices is seen as a major driving force in 2016 and beyond. Widespread potential is seen in transforming fitness tracking devices into applications and deliverable devices in which useful medical information can be tracked and acted upon.

Imagine a physician remotely monitoring a group of cardiology patients with Holter monitors from his home and the patients, instead of suffocating in a hospital, can be resting comfortably form their homes. This world will soon be a reality and personalized and customizable forms of medicine will present in an on-demand fashion. As a result of large groups of patients being monitored 24/7, this will spread the risk and drive the costs down for the individual patients. Welcome to the future of medicine. Healthcare insurance companies will soon provide premium relief for those who wear devices, which transmit data to a central database. Internally, this data will help predict future trends in medicine through the current and developing artificial intelligence algorithms.

Pharmaceuticals, as a result of the genome project, have developed entirely new biologics and devices, advancing medicine into a new age. Soon enough, they will be able to pinpoint specific genes and use drugs to target diseases using CRISPR-Cas9 and similar gene editing methods. Lifestyle disease such as diabetes and heart disease will become things of the past. Routine blood and urine monitoring will provide the analytics division an incredible amount of information. The raw data will spur the development of more advanced drugs, devices, and artificial intelligence.

Newer technologies will develop, and soon out strip the smart watches and fitness tracking devices. Wearable devices, which integrate fashion and customization are the hottest things to come to the market in a generation.

As wearable devices develop, the concerns of data privacy and encryption will become paramount. Precision and accuracy will become fine-tuned through clinical trials, confirming the reliability of data among different medical conditions. The collection of data from the specific sensors will also prove challenging, since humans do not always operate within the narrow confines of a programming language. Changes in human blood, sweat, tears, emotions, and environments can all skew data from being collected.

We are excited to explore the innovations from engineers, entrepreneurs, and healthcare professionals at CES 2016. We expect this year to bring us one step closer to a wearable devices revolution, beyond that of basic fitness tracking, into a world where diseases and conditions can be accurately diagnosed and treated remotely and conveniently.

Source: Wearable Devices Magazine