Fitbit will use Google’s Cloud Healthcare application programming interface to develop consumer and enterprise health solutions for wearables, it said Monday. Using Google’s healthcare API, Fitbit will connect user data with electronic medical records to give patients and clinicians a detailed view of a patient’s profile, with the goal of more personalized care, said the company. The companies hope to help better manage chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension by using services such as Twine Health, recently acquired by Fitbit, they said. Moving to the Google Cloud platform will allow Fitbit to scale its business and accelerate its pace of innovation “to define the next generation of healthcare and wearables,” said CEO James Park. Most Google Cloud products support Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance, including Cloud IoT Core, they said. Fitbit will also use Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and its predictive analytic algorithms, to help consumers achieve positive health outcomes, it said.
Garmin unveiled Connect IQ 3.0, an open platform for third-party developers to create apps for Garmin wearables, bike computers and outdoor handheld devices, it said Wednesday. At its developers' conference, the company previewed upcoming products, including the $279 Edge 520 Plus GPS bike computer that’s said to be optimized for on- and off-road cycling and the $130 Edge 130, a compact computer billed as providing “accurate ride data so cyclists know how far, fast and high they ride.” It also showed new Connect IQ apps from MySwimPro, Trailforks, Yelp, iHeartRadio and GU.
Toshiba bowed augmented reality smart glasses jointly developed with Vuzix (see 1712070049) that combine the dynaEdge AR100 head-mounted display with a dynaEdge DE 100 mobile mini PC. The AR glasses ($1,899) are designed to help businesses bring an on-the-job hands-free Windows PC experience to field workers using AR, voice and touch human machine interface technologies, Carl Pinto, vice president-marketing and engineering, Client Services division, told us in a pre-briefing. Users can run Windows applications to browse PDF documents, view movies and photos, and shoot photos and movies with sound, he said. Workers and technicians can communicate with each other via text messages, video, audio and still images. The 3-ounce smart glass viewer has an integrated micro display that provides a viewing experience equivalent to a 5-inch mobile device screen seen at 17 inches, Pinto said, and packs integrated GPS, three-axis accelerometers for head tracking, a five-megapixel point-of-view camera, ear speaker, dual noise-canceling mics and a two-axis touch pad. The glasses pair via USB-C with a 6.5 x 3.3 x 0.8-inch, 11-ounce Intel Core M-powered mini PC that fits into a supplied protective belt-worn holster. Vuzix created the glasses for Toshiba under a three-year supply agreement signed last year for an "entirely new Vuzix product for Toshiba" that's based on Vuzix M300 smart glasses, the company said Monday. The initial purchase order received by Toshiba has an expected minimum of $5 million in purchases in the first 12 months, Vuzix said. First production shipments are due within 30 days, it said.
Kopin’s new generation of Solos smart glasses for fitness enthusiasts, which the company announced at CES, will launch in “a few weeks,” said Kopin CEO John Fan on a Thursday earnings call. “The devil is in the details” of the launch, said Fan. “There are so many details that affect us, including even packaging, how the box will look like, everything. So, we're in the final stretch right now.” The new version of Solos enables cyclists and runners “to leverage wearable sensors to provide real-time progress updates, such as speed, power, heartbeat and many other metrics,” and use the Solos smartphone app “to track their progress,” said Fan. Kopin believes its Elf virtual-reality headset, also shown at CES, “is the most compact and lightweight virtual reality headset developed today,” said Fan. The Elf incorporates a pair of Kopin’s Lightning OLED displays that render 2048x2048 resolution for each eye, he said. The effect is to “deliver a picture-like image” to the user while eliminating “potential” VR motion sickness because of its high 120 Hz refresh rate, he said. Kopin regards the Elf as “the first VR headset that meets the size, weight and performance” requirements “that may drive adoption of VR technology” to the masses, he said. Kopin introduced its first Lightning OLED displays at 2017 CES, “and now, in just one year's time, we have increased the brightness of OLED displays by a factor of 10, an amazing improvement in performance,” he said.
Garmin bowed the ruggedized tactix Charlie, a $749 GPS wearable combining “tactical functionality” with preloaded, color topographic navigation and fitness training features, said the company Thursday. Navigation features include a three-axis compass, gyroscope and barometric altimeter, along with GPS and Global Navigation Satellite System support, it said. Garmin Elevate technology gives users 24/7 heart rate monitoring, without needing a chest strap, and they can monitor their activities with training status, training load, recovery time, V02 max and more, Garmin said.
Total shipments in the global wearables market set new records in Q4 and for all of 2017, with Apple riding a “surge” in smartwatch shipment volumes to overtake Fitbit and Xiaomi for “overall leadership for both the quarter and the year,” said IDC in a Thursday report. Total volume for Q4 increased 7.7 percent to 37.9 million units, while shipments for the year climbed 10.3 percent to 115.4 million units, said IDC. Apple “suddenly finds itself atop the wearables market,” said the report. "Interest in smartwatches continues to grow and Apple is well-positioned to capture demand.” User tastes in smartwatches “have become more sophisticated over the past several quarters,” and Apple “pounced on the demand for cellular connectivity and streaming multimedia” in its latest Apple Watch, said IDC. Apple shipped 8 million wearables in Q4, a 57.5 percent increase from the same quarter a year earlier, for a market-leading 21 percent share, up from 14.4 percent share in Q4 of 2016, said the report. For all of 2017, Apple shipped 17.7 million wearables, 55.9 percent more than in 2016, giving it a market-leading 15.3 percent share for the year, it said. Apple’s share was only 10.8 percent for 2016, it said.
The clothing-based fitness wearables and hearables market will grow from an expected 4.5 million shipments in 2018 to 30 million in 2022, a 550 percent increase, said a Wednesday Juniper Research report. Conventional fitness tracker shipments are expected to rise 20 percent over the period. Market share for lifestyle tracking companies Fitbit and Huami is forecast to drop from over 40 percent in 2017 to 28 percent of total fitness wearable shipments by 2022 as session‑specific wearables from companies including Under Armour, Sensoria, Gymwatch, Atlas and Jabra -- offering more granular metrics without additional messaging and call-handling functions of general wearables -- gain ground, said the report. A battleground for fitness wearables is data, but fitness software and services revenue is expected to remain under $200 million per year due to “lack of consumer interest,” Juniper said. The research firm expects healthcare wearables to make up under a third of the sector’s devices by 2022 “as regulation slows roll-outs and keeps prices high.”
As the need grows for “complex, differentiated use cases” for wearable devices, so too will the devices’ size and weight increase, causing discomfort to users wanting to wear them daily, reported Strategy Analytics Wednesday. It said hardware design “is one of the most obstructive factors for wearable devices because it inhibits what they can actually do.” The need for wearables to be comfortable and lightweight “conflicts with the ideals of longer battery life and more distinct applications,” and there’s “only so much a small device can do,” it said. Even smart earbuds and headsets “that offer distinct audio manipulation features are inhibited by their short battery life and dependency on a smartphone,” said the report. “They are too small to be truly independent devices.”
Garmin announced its latest activity tracker, the vivofit 4, the day after Christmas. The basic tracker, said to be safe to use while swimming and showering, claims a one-year battery life from a coin battery. An activity tracker is “only as effective as how often you wear it,” said Dan Bartel, Garmin vice president-worldwide sales, noting the device doesn’t have to be removed for recharging. The $79 tracker can be paired with a smartphone. Garmin didn’t respond to questions.
The overall global market for wearables will nearly double to 222.3 million units in 2021, from 113.2 million this year, said IDC Wednesday. “Basic wristbands” like the Fitbit Charge are the most popular category of wearables this year, but they’re “quickly becoming commodities” and will yield their market leadership to smartwatches in four years, said IDC. Basic wristbands had a 39.8 percent unit share this year compared with 27.9 percent for smartwatches, but in 2021 smartwatches will be 32.1 percent of total wearable units, vs. 21.5 percent for basic wristbands, it said. Smartwatches, led mainly by the Apple Watch, are expected to ship 71.5 million units in 2021, up from 31.6 million in 2017, IDC said. Contributing growth factors include the adoption of cellular connectivity, additional SKUs from fashion brands and the transition of kids’ watches “from basic location tracking watches to more sophisticated watches that allow kids to play games, run apps, and communicate with friends/family,” said IDC.