Consumer Electronics Show: Wearables emerge as top trend

The T-shirt that tracks your heartbeat. The bra that tells you if you are eating too much. The badge-sized camera that takes photos from your lapel every few seconds, all day long. The headset that tracks how quickly you blink to see if you're tired - then tries to wake you up.

People who were already alarmed by the future heralded by Google Glass, with its face-borne camera and screen, could be in for a shock. A wild array of new wearable technology is the talk of this week's Consumer Electronics Show, as both established companies such as Sony and Samsung, and a multitude of start-ups, propose ever more inventive and surprising ways to augment the human body with sensors and displays.

John Curran, a senior executive at Accenture's communications, media and technology group, sees "wearables" as the top trend to emerge at this year's CES in Las Vegas.

"The first big story [of CES 2014] is the real inflection point for wearable devices," he says. "It is about these devices moving from niche applications and early adopters into much more mainstream products."

Fitness devices make up the vast majority of the wearable technology market at the moment, which Accenture estimates is worth somewhere between $1bn and $3bn today. As the sophistication, convenience and aesthetic appeal of new kinds of devices such as smart watches improve, Mr Curran forecasts the wearables market will rise to as much as $8bn by 2018.

"We are seeing more sensors with more miniaturisation, more durability and more accurate data," he says.

Until now, most fitness trackers just counted how far we walk every day, as a proxy for how active we are overall. But basic step-counting bracelets such as the Fitbit Flex and Jawbone's Up are seeing more of their movement-tracking capabilities absorbed by smartphones such as the iPhone 5s and Moto X - as even their own executives admit.

Brad Kittredge, director of product management for Up at Jawbone, admits that Apple's M7 chip, dedicated to processing motion data in the latest iPhone, "somewhat duplicates" the work of the Up wristband's algorithms.

"The data capture of steps has been a little bit commoditised there but the actual smart usage of that [data] . . . and adding that together with a number of other measures that are important is still not something that's easily solved," Mr Kittredge says, citing Up's sleep-monitoring features.

"Activity trackers are going to go the way of MP3 players and GPS units," says Sonny Vu, chief executive of Misfit Wearables, as single-purpose gadgets are replaced by smartphones and their wearable accessories in the next two years.

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"I think life is more than just steps," says Mr Vu, noting that the Shine can be used to track swimming or cycling too. "More sensors, more data resolution, more functionality - that's what we're all about. We don't have 10 PhDs on staff full-time just to do step counting."

Consumers' appetite for more sophisticated tracking devices is still somewhat unproven, however.

A recent Forrester Research survey of more than 4,500 American consumers found that more than a quarter would wear sensors on their wrists or clipped on to clothing - above the 4 per cent it estimates are using fitness trackers today - but only a few said they were prepared to go much further. While 15 per cent would embed technology into their clothing, 4 per cent would wear smart contact lenses and 3 per cent would tattoo sensors on to their skin, but only if they thought they would see enough benefit from them.

Nonetheless, start-ups are already working on all of those ideas. For example, Montreal-based OMSignal, which counts Flextronics among its investors, is developing sensors for T-shirts and other clothing that can measure steps, breathing, heart rate and more, using Bluetooth to create a live feed of the collected data that can warn the wearer about their highs, lows or anomalies. Vigo is running a Kickstarter campaign for its $100 earpiece which it claims is the "first wearable device to quantify your alertness", through "an infrared sensor, an accelerometer, and a clever algorithm".

Investors in hardware start-ups admit that it is still too early to see how the market will evolve - but some see that as a plus, not a problem.

True Ventures is among the backers of both Fitbit and Sweden's Narrative. Formerly known as Memoto, the Narrative Clip is a $279 "life logging" camera that raised $550,000 on Kickstarter in November 2012 and has recently started shipping to those backers.

"What's interesting about both companies is they make the invisible part of our lives visible, in an ambient, ongoing fashion," says Jon Callaghan, a founder of True Ventures. "In Fitbit's case, it's actionable information for wellness. In Narrative's case, we don't know what the 'aha' will be behind the data, the imaging and the life-logging - and that's really exciting."

Component makers believe the opportunity in wearable technology is large but are unsure of exactly when it will sell in meaningful volumes. "We are in the ramping phase of this," said Paul Jacobs, executive chairman at Qualcomm, in an interview when he stepped down as chief executive last month. "There is a lot of excitement around wearables right now . . . This is the next new thing, it hasn't hit yet but it will take off at a point in the future."

Qualcomm Ventures was among the investors in Fitbit's $43m funding round last August, as it tries to help stimulate the market. James Park, Fitbit's chief executive, says the company is working to improve battery life and make its fitness trackers even smaller, but warns that some wearable devices - such as Samsung's Galaxy Gear watch - are already getting too complicated for many customers beyond the early adopter crowd.

"It's really easy to track a lot of things but it's also easy to overwhelm consumers with a lot of data," he says. "There is a Cambrian explosion of different approaches . . . There's a point at which you can do a little too much. This whole category is not 'one size fits all'."

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