How Wearables Intersect with the Cloud and the Internet of Things: Considerations for the developers of wearables

The first wearables DevCon for developers of wearables was held in San Francisco 5?7 March 2014 and was greeted with great enthusiasm, with more than 1,000 people attending the three-day event. With the introduction of Google Glass, Epson Moverio, Pebble, and Fitbit, wearables have certainly captured the attention of many consumers and enterprises. While some of these wearables mainly provide a single function, such as fitness tracking, health monitoring, and message display, others have taken on the integration of multiple functions in the same device; the BASIS watch, for example, combines time, fitness, and health-monitoring functions into a single device. According to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research, ?Wearable Technology Market?Global Scenario, Trends, Industry Analysis, Size, Share and Forecast, 2012?2018,? the global wearable technology market is expected to grow from US$750 million in 2012 to US$5.8 billion in 2018. U.K.-based Juniper Research projects that the number of wearable devices shipped will rise from about 13 million in 2013 to 130 million in 2018, and the size of the market will jump from US$1.4 billion in 2013 to US$19 billion in 2018. Business Insider Intelligence projects shipments of 100 million units in 2014 and forecasts the market will ultimately be worth about US$12 billion per year. Such widely divergent forecasts by research firms are typical when industries are in their relative infancies and hypergrowth mode.