Industry Articles

By Diya Soubra, ARM
EETimes Europe (September 17, 2014)

The fast evolving market for wearable products will see explosive growth and many new use cases over the next few years. Market research company IHS predicts this market will be worth $30 billion in revenues and 210 million units by 2018.

Devices worn on the wrist such as fitness activity trackers like Misfit or Misfit Shine, smartwatches like the Pebble mobile smartwatch or the recently announced Omate X smartwatch or products with the potential to form a new category like wristbands that authenticate a user's identity through their electrocardiogram (ECG) are likely to make up a majority of shipments.

But there are number of other imaginative use cases such as T-shirts with embedded displays that potentially could show a video that is running on the wearer’s smartphone, along with a whole host of new applications that will fully grasp the possibilities offered by wearables as part of the Internet of things, linking devices to cloud computing.