The market for Smart Watches and Fitness trackers is overflowing with products that depict the market´s typical maturing point:
- Customers know what they want and how much they pay to get what they want and are not easily impressed with fizzy specs
- Main market leaders* are established and are pushing out newcomers and non-specialists, unable to compete on price.
- New specs nor disruptive technologies are on the consumers´ mind when considering purchasing a smart watch. For tracking and tracking your personal lifestyle it seems that all configurations on the wrist has been tried and tested. No new form factor appears to be on the tech horizon when it comes to ´wristables´.
- Added value in terms of market drivers are price and marketing currently, rather than the technology itself. In other words: a smart watch of 300$ or over has to try considerably harder than 3 years ago in convincing the potential buyer it´s worth it.
- The Smart Watch has become a Cash Cow, generating large ROIs for the initial investors.
The overall conclusion is that a smarter and fitter lifestyle driven by a wrist device has become available to the mainstream of consumers. Does this mean that WT is now a consolidated cash cow that needs no further R&D investment? On the contrary.
*Toronto based tech Analysts Teardown are experts in the field of tearing down in the positive sense of the word of new technology solutions. As the technology field is highly focused on wearable tech, unsurprisingly Teardown has peeled off the different layers of all sorts of Wearable devices. The following 7 smart watches have been under the Canadian´s magnifying glass in 2014 alone.
The 7 smartest smart watches of 2014: 1. Qualcomm Toq Smartwatch ToqSW1
Wearable Tech apllied for tracking started off with the idea of attaining a more conscious lifestyle where you are in charge of your time, your life, your health, your fitness. Basically WT has freed us from being chained to the desk for many tasks that do not require you sit down. In the end an automated society´s goal is to become more time efficient by applying hardware and software tools.
Wearable Technologies have the potential to actually help us achieve that goal: to free us from the desk. The driving force for shaping the Wearable Future is the grade in which these technologies can support a truly balanced work-fitness-fun-health-family life.
The wrist as a carrier has already been optimized, so what is the next generation body part to an optimized future? The ear? The foot? The skin? It all depends on its specific application:
- Skin: optimizing health monitoring & health care
- Ear: optimizing fitness & health monitoring
- The foot: optimizing fitness
- The eye: optimizing health care
- The wrist: optimizing work flow
- The belly: optimizing health monitoring & health care
- Limb extensions, replacement & reinforcements: health care & optimizing work flow
- Stomach & Intestines: optimizing health monitoring & health care in the very foreseeable future when we think about the potential of swallowable sensors
- Blood stream (advanced nano-technology): optimizing health care
If your are an adaptor of any type of wearable technology on the wrist, you are part of a community that drives this market. And as an experienced user you are able to give your valuable opinion on where you believe valuable new technology will provide the best optimizing potential.
Other than the wrist, where on body would you wear the next generation wearable tech? We would like to hear your opinion by taking the questionnaire on Google+. We will publish the results here.
