Articles Tagged with ''wearable''

NXP Semiconductors has entered into a definitive agreement with Quintic to acquire assets and IP related to its Wearable and Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) IC business.

A new report by Juniper Research has found that fitness wearables in-use will almost treble by 2018, compared to an estimated 19 million in-use devices this year. Juniper expects fitness to remain the dominant wearables segment until that time, driven by intuitive use cases and lower retail prices.

Despite major GPS fitness device OEMs announcing new fitness products at CES 2014, it looks like an increasingly difficult battle between smart devices and wearables. Garmin launched its Vivofit fitness band and Vivoki/Vivahub corporate wellness solution. Magallen is one of the few companies in the GPS device OEM space that continues to show flashes of innovation, opening up its Echo watch platform to a range of third party smartphone application developers.

Wearable technology will be characterized by the diversity of products, but only the product categories with a clear use-case and therefore target audience will succeed. ABI Research projects the wearable device sales volumes in 2014 to come from healthcare and sports and activity trackers. While, the commercial launch of several smart glass products, including Google Glass will continue to drive interest in the wearable space, it will not be a significant commercial success in 2014.

The market for disposable wireless Medical Body Area Network (MBAN) sensors within professional healthcare is in its earliest stages, but key foundations to support adoption are now in place. There is also tremendous potential for adoption. So much so that by 2018, close to 5 million disposable sensors will be shipped even though MBAN sensors will have still barely penetrated the addressable market.

A slew of new devices leveraging improved connectivity to mobile handsets have fueled strong growth for wearable wireless mHealth devices in 2012. By the end of the year, nearly 30 million devices will have shipped, up 37 percent on 2011 shipments.