The global wearables market “maintained its upward trajectory” in Q1, with Xiaomi and Apple leading all companies and multiple products experiencing double- and triple-digit sales growth, IDC said in a Monday report. All companies in the wearables space shipped a collective total of 24.7 million devices in Q1, up 17.9 percent from the same 2016 quarter, it said. "Fitbit finds itself in the midst of a transformation as user tastes evolve from fitness bands to watches and other products," IDC said. "This allowed Xiaomi to throttle up on its inexpensive devices within the China market and for Apple to leverage its position as the leading smartwatch provider worldwide. Now that Xiaomi and Apple have supplanted Fitbit, the next question is whether they will be able to maintain their position.”
Fitbit pitched sleep tracking as an additional benefit of its fitness trackers, in a Wednesday announcement. The company will present a study at the upcoming Sleep 2017 conference in Boston on how devices such as its Fitbit Alta HR, Blaze and Charge 2 can be used to accurately determine light, deep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stages, it said. Having the ability to gather sleep stage data on wrist-worn devices can help simplify research and raise knowledge about sleep, it said. Fitbit announced new sleep features in April, using heart rate variability to estimate the amount of time users spent in light, deep and REM sleep, as well as time awake each night, it said. The Sleep 2017 conference opens Saturday for a four-day run.
The U.S. ranked 28th in a Fitbit list of 30 of the “fittest countries,” said the wearables company in a Monday news release based on aggregated data from more than 20 million Fitbit tracker users worldwide. Fitbit based on the rankings on average daily steps, active minutes, goals met for reminders to move, resting heart rate and sleep duration. Ireland was ranked as fittest country, followed by the U.K., Sweden, Netherlands and Switzerland, said the analysis. Duluth, Minnesota; Appleton, Wisconsin; Eau Claire, Wisconsin; Boulder, Colorado; and Bellingham, Washington, were ranked the top five fittest American cities.
Pixie Technology announced availability of the Pixie location tracker for iPhones in a Tuesday news release. The trackers are said to use augmented reality to show the location of misplaced objects, differing from Bluetooth types that make users “chase a beep” to find lost items by showing visual cues on the iPhone screen, said the company. Pixie uses signaling technology based on GPS principles, and range is 30-50 feet indoors, 150 feet outdoors, it said. According to a survey commissioned by Pixie among 1,700 consumers last fall, consumers’ top misplaced item is a TV remote, lost by more than 71 percent of consumers at least once a month, followed by phones, keys, glasses and shoes. A two-pack of Pixie Points is $49; a four-pack, $69, at getpixie.com.
LifeBEAM Labs launched what it called the first voice-activated artificial intelligence personal trainer. The Vi voice engine, built into biosensing Bluetooth earphones with Harman Kardon audio, gives real-time coaching based on a user’s behavior, environment and physiology, said a Monday company announcement. Users can ask Vi how they’re doing to get an update of current readings, said the company. Vi builds on in-ear biosensing technology LifeBEAM developed for the aerospace industry, with sensors detecting heart rate, motion, posture, speech enhancement, elevation and touch, said the company. It integrates with third-party apps Google Fit, Apple’s HealthKit and Strava, and the earphones can call up music from a user’s Spotify account or music stored on their smartphone. The $249 Vi earphones went on sale at the company’s website Monday and will be available at Amazon and bestbuy.com at the end of the month, the company said.
ZTE announced its first wearable for the U.S. market, the Android 2.0-based Quartz, priced at $192 and available from T-Mobile.com Friday and in T-Mobile stores April 21, it said in a Monday announcement. The watch can be used as a companion to a smartphone or as a standalone wearable capable of making calls on its own, said the company. Features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 1.4-inch AMOLED display, Gorilla Glass 3, 500 mAh battery and compatibility with the Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform.
The Fitbit Alta HR fitness wristband ($149) went on sale worldwide Monday, offering continuous heart rate tracking. Features include automatic exercise recognition, sleep tracking, up to seven-day battery life and smart notifications, said the company in an announcement. Available this week are new Fitbit software features, including sleep stages and sleep insights, across Android, iOS and Windows devices, Fitbit said. Retailers include Amazon.com, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Kohl’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Target, REI and Verizon, it said.
Fitbit began taking preorders Monday for the Alta HR heart rate tracking device with new advances in sleep tracking, said the company in an announcement. Sleep tracking technology uses heart rate variability to estimate the amount of time users spend in light, deep and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, along with the time awake each night, it said. Fitbit’s sleep insights software analyzes data to provide personalized guidance on how to improve sleep, it said. Suggested retail price is $149, with April availability, said the company.
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 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.
Amid poor holiday-quarter sales at Fitbit that sent the company’s shares tumbling Monday to record lows (see 1701300062), Futuresource in a Tuesday blog post said Q4 capped a “disappointing year for wearable device sales” for the category overall. A big market problem is that demand for connected smartwatches is failing “to fill the void” left by slowing growth in fitness trackers, it said. The slowdown is “partly explained by waning appeal of the novelty associated with tracking activity and wearable devices in general,” and indications developed markets are maturing and becoming saturated, it said. Though wearables performed “below expectations” in 2016, “there are still opportunities for growth in the wearables category in emerging and developing markets,” the researcher said.