Smartwatches to impact on fitness and wellness

Smartwatches are set to have a significant impact on fitness and wellness in the second half of this decade, with a range of features for wellness monitoring and fitness and sport activities.

While 2013, sales are expected to be total less than 270,000 units rising to a relatively modest 2.6 million units in 2014, in the longer term sales are expected to reach much higher volumes, with units rising to nearly 39 million units in 2018.

With the market for mobile apps used for wellness monitoring and fitness and sport activities on smartphones set to rise 63% from 2012 to 2017, the potential of smartwatches to include functions such as heart-rate monitors (HRMs) is expected to be a key element in their acceptance and growing sales.

However, with the first generation of smartwatches such as Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch only having a short battery life of about 25 hours, for acceptance future smartwatches will have to have stay charged longer.

In addition, future smartwatches will have to be smaller to appeal to users expecting a device in the form of a wristwatch.

Perhaps most importantly, the Galaxy Gear smartwatch is compatible only with Samsung's newly-announced Galaxy Note 3 smartphone and Note 10.1 tablet. With the Galaxy Gear smartwatch intended to operate as a companion device for smartphones or tablets, this limited compatibility relegates the product to a small subset of the much larger potential market.

Shane Walker, Senior Manager for medical devices and healthcare IT at technology information specialists IHS, explains "most of the smartwatches set to be introduced into the market in the near term are expected to use a similar approach as the Galaxy Gear device, with the devices only working as accessories to smartphones.

"Uptake will be constrained if the smartwatch simply serves as a second display for a smartphone, because there already is significant competition from dedicated devices serving performance-monitoring products.

"To achieve its market potential, the smartwatch must work as a standalone device, with features that are compatible with the wristwatch form factor."

As an example of this strategy, Qualcomm's new Toq smartwatch is intended to act as an accessory product, serving as a second screen for a smartphone.

Qualcomm noted the advantages of this approach, including an "always on" capability, a less intrusive user experience compared to taking out a smartphone, the addition of a sunlight readable display and smartphone power savings by minimising the number of times a user turns on the display for many common tasks.