Tag: wearable devices

Wearable technology industry will be worth $34 billion in 4 years

| February 24, 2016

By the year 2020, CCS Insight is predicting that there will be 411 million wearables owned by consumers.

Analyst firm, CCS Insight has now give its wearable technology outlook an update, now predicting that by 2020, there will be 411 million smart wearable technology devices owned by consumers, and that the industry will be worth a massive $34 billion.

The firm also stated that, by the close of 2016, the wearables industry will have broken the $14 billion mark.

The predictions that it has made is that wrist-based wearable technology devices, such as many fitness trackers and smartwatches, will continue to top the list among the most popular gadgets in the category. The forecast the analyst has issued has stated that wrist-worn wearables will make up half of all sales in this category in the upcoming 12 months. Moreover, smartwatches are expected to make up 50 percent of the predicted 60 million device shipments that it expects to occur during that time.

This wearable technology update has changed since mid-2015, showing a 41 percent market share for the Apple Watch.

Wearable Technology Industry worth billionsAt that time, it said that there would be 20 million Apple Watches sold in 2015. That said, its data has now shown that during that time, the figure was strikingly lower; at only 9 million device sales.

Previously in February, another firm, Canalys, had indicated that its estimates were that in 2015, there were 12 million Apple Watches shipped. If that firm’s claims are true, that would give the company a much larger share, at about two thirds of the smartwatch marketplace. On the other hand, a week after that, Gartner released its figures and said that in 2015, the total number of smartwatch sales from all brands was 30 million. These varying numbers and measures make it evident that knowing what has already happened may be just as difficult to measure as predicting what will be occurring a few years down the road.

According to CCS Insight chief of research, Ben Wood, when discussing the wearable technology forecast report, “Given the rising consumer apathy toward smartphones, it is little wonder so many companies are chasing the rapidly growing opportunity presented by wearables. We’re particularly excited about the potential for augmented and virtual reality devices, and we predict 2016 will be a pivotal year.”

Mobile security may not be as high in fitness trackers as owners believe

| February 5, 2016

A new report has indicated that certain wearables and the apps needed to use them are posing a privacy risk.

Citizen Lab, in partnership with Open Effect have now released a report that has suggested that the mobile security being provided by several popular fitness trackers are actually vulnerable to potential tampering, surveillance and tracking over the long term.

These devices are quite commonplace and are used to allow a person to monitor his or her physical activity.

The report was the result of an examination of eight different fitness trackers and the mobile apps that are needed to use them. It was conducted by Citizen Lab from the University of Toronto, and the Open Effect not-for-profit research group. They looked into these applications and wearables to determine the level of mobile security and privacy they were able to provide. The trackers the researchers examined included: the Fitbit Charge HR, Jawbone Up 2, Garmin Vivosmart, Basis Peak, Mio Fuse, Xiaomi Mi Band, Withings Pulse O2 and even the Apple Watch.

The researchers looked at a range of different mobile security measures for every device they considered.

Wearable Technology - Mobile SecurityThe factors included those pertaining to the collection and storage of data, as well as their transmission practices. What they determined was that every device, aside from the Apple Watch, persistently emitted uniqueIDs by way of their embedded Bluetooth radios. Those identifications could potentially expose the users of the wearables to location tracking over the long-term, even at times in which the device was not paired to a smartphone or tablet.

The report said the Apple Watch was the only one among the wearables that actually randomized its Bluetooth ID, causing it to be impossible to track that smartwatch over the long-term.

The authors of the report also pointed out that the Jawbone and Withings app was vulnerable to being exploited in order to crate fraudulent fitness records. The reason this poses a mobile security risk due to the chance that the data collected by personal fitness wearables could be used in court cases, health insurance programs and for other official reasons. Therefore, if that data has been falsified, it could create a highly undesirable risk for the users.