Right now, the majority of American adults own smart technology, making it a multi-billion dollar industry.
While it took several years to implement smart technology into our lives, the wearable market is expected to increase at an even livelier pace.
While a mobile device is portable and can accompany you wherever you go, it isn’t something you have to carry all the time. Wearables stay with you wherever you go. They can be planted in your eyes as contact lenses, worn on your arm as a watch, even inserted internally in your organs and used as health monitors. Their sole purpose is to collect data, send, and perform executions based on the desired end results.
Wearables differ from smart technology in several significant ways.
Size – the most obvious is the display screen. Smart technology is meant to be used, read and looked at regularly, where wearables may be designed without a screen at all.
Functionality – wearables have specific purposes. A lot of their functionality involves tracking and communicating back to a mobile device.
Experience – wearables offer limited user experience. They are designed to interact with an app or mobile device, transmitting information to another format.
Platform – smart technology can transfer from device to device for improved user experiences. Wearables will only work if they are used as intended, and can only be displayed when integrated back with its original program.
Should you business strategy include mobile or wearables? In the very near future, the two will become integrated as one. By as early as 2017, wearable devices will drive as much as 50 percent of total app interactions.
The key to making it more successful is integrating real-time.
Up until now, wearables are good at telling people what they’re doing wrong. They’re good at being in the now. But where they lack is making suggestions for how to make it better.
For instance, wearables can easily track how many steps you’re taking every day. It can plot a users averages to give them an overall view of the action they are taking.
But what a wearable can’t do is make a suggestion to take the stairs instead of riding up in an elevator. It can’t tell a user he’d be better off adding another form of cardio to his workout routine. That’s where human intervention comes into play.
That’s also how the two can eventually come together. It’s all about being able to intervene real time. Making suggestions based on six months of data won’t change habits. But jumping in and making suggestions while the process is happening, created, that’s where the real potential lies.
There’s no doubt wearables are here to stay. It’s just a matter of determining how best to implement them into our lives.
How do you see wearable technology in your future?
