Smart Glass on Growth Curve as Smartwatches, Fitness Trackers Slow, Says Report
The dominant wearables categories, smartwatches and fitness trackers, “have begun to slow” and will own just over half of wearables revenue by 2021, compared with an expected 75 percent this year, said a Tuesday Juniper Research report. Smart glasses will…
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be the highest growth sector of consumer wearables over the next five years, reaching 11 percent of the overall wearables market by 2021, it said. Smart glasses revenue is forecast to grow from $327 million this year to $9 billion by 2021, as a new generation of devices emerges, said Juniper. More “ambitious” wearables, requiring new modes of interaction, will bring more options to consumers in the near future, said Juniper, saying smart glasses are being repositioned from their technological roots to appear more like conventional glasses. It cited new products from Osterhout Design Group and GlassUp that are designed to look more like “large sunglasses.” Designs that are more attractive will help remove the stigma of wearing smart glasses in public, it said. Ear-based wearables, known as hearables, will bring more capabilities, using voice commands and gestures as user interfaces. Healthcare wearables -- forecast to have a $7 billion increase in annual revenue from 2017 to 2021 -- will be used for personalized services and preventive recommendations, said the research firm, though the volume of information could make interpretation difficult. “Wearable biometric data alone isn’t immediately helpful,” said analyst James Moar. “The key task for wearable healthcare now is to make the data meaningful to healthcare professionals,” he said, and that will require better algorithms to process the data and new user interfaces to understand it.