Wearable technology has become a buzz word in the past couple of years. It’s difficult to navigate through the tech blogosphere and even mainstream news media without running into the stories about various companies and their latest wearable tech developments. Companies like Apple, Google, Samsung, Motorola, and others are all investing major amounts of research and development into the production of these technologies, marching ahead under the bold assumptions that people want these technologies and that they know what people want from this form-factor.
The purpose of technology in general, one might argue, is to simplify the lives of those making use of it by solving a particular problem. Early wearable tech projects such as the crowd-funded Pebble Smartwatch or the pre-emptive Samsung Galaxy Gear attempt to provide the wearer information they could otherwise get simply by retrieving a phone from they pocket, and nothing more. This is to be expected from a market that, for much of its history, has focused largely on “miniaturizing” existing technologies (Wilson, 2013). While it is difficult to analyze the potential for success of a market as young as that of wearable technology, through the use of various data-analysis techniques and tools such as R, BatchGeo, CartoDB, ScraperWiki, and Google Trends, we can gain some insight into the validity of the assumptions these tech companies are operating under.
Two questions naturally arise surrounding wearable technologies. The first is, are people interested in using wearable technology at all? The limited success of the Pebble and the Galaxy Gear put to doubt the public interest in these kinds of technologies, because while neither of these devices were failures per se, neither were they the runaway success early commenters believed they would be. Either the market for these wearable tech products is so niche that the broader public is uninterested, or something about the nature of these devices fails to appeal to everyday people. The second question that arises is, regardless of whether people are interested in current on-the-market devices, what would people want out of the ideal wearable device? As previously mentioned, technology should be able to solve a particular problem, so we must ask what problem people wish to solve through the use of these devices. As is turns out, both of these questions can be at least partially answered through the use of the aforementioned data analysis tools.
Literature Review
Much has been said about the virtues and perils of wearable technology by industry web blogs and news sites. Many claim it to be the next big thing in technology, the successor to the smartphone, and nothing short of a revolution in tech paradigms. Indeed, there is no doubt that wearable technology holds promise. Those who herald the arrival of this revolution praise the ability of wearable technology to actually downgrade the role of technology in our lives while simultaneously bringing it to a more personal level. Sure, the amount of technology we have on our person might increase, but the ways we interact with these devices will become more subtle and less distracting. Not only will we be able to get the information we have become addicted to having at all times—emails, Facebook notifications, SMS, etc.—but we will be able to do it in such a way that minimizes the the amount of time we spend distracted from the real world. Rather than focusing on what’s going on on the screen in the palm of our hands, we can get what we need and focus on what’s happening in real life.
One of the ways wearables hope to accomplish this is through more intelligent retrieval of information. Rather than dumbly polling our smartphone for information at random intervals, notifications will be presented to us when we need them, and get out of the way just as quickly. One of the standout features of Google Glass, a pioneer in the wearable technology industry, is its ability to present contextually-aware information through Google Now. Far from home? Glass will present you with traffic information. Looked at a product online? Glass will let you know if it is available in a nearby store when you are out shopping.
The implications of these devices go far beyond these more trivial use-cases, too. With a wide array of sensors available, devices that track your heart-rate, blood pressure, sleep quality, and other health stats can more effectively help you and your doctor track your health in real-time. The wealth of information collected over time may allow doctors to more accurately identify triggers for certain disorders, or diagnose disease more effectively. REM-tracking sleep-sensors can tell you valuable information about the quality of your sleep over time, as well as wake you up at ideal points during your sleep cycle for a more refreshing start to your morning routine.
With all these rich applications, it stands to reason that people will be highly interested in acquiring these devices. It is no wonder analysts believe wearables will be a thirty-billion dollar market by 2018 (Mendoza, 2014). Additionally, industry forecasts claim more than 500 Million people by 2015 will be using mobile health applications, the direct benefactors of the diverse range of sensor data (Schüll, 2014). The crowd-funded Pebble smart watch seemingly confirmed consumer interest in the wearables space after it completely blew-away its Kickstarter goal and raised over ten-million dollars from almost 70K backers.
However, despite this promise, things aren’t all rose-colored in the wearables market. The standout success story of Pebble aside, many other wearable devices have been faced with disinterest or, in the case of Google Glass, flat out disdain. Many cases have come to light of people feeling their privacy invaded by the possibility of being discretely monitored by Glass-toting users. Some warn of the danger of providing more data points for Big Brother to monitor—the recent NSA scandal in the U.S. has not made anyone more eager to have their activity monitored.
Then there’s the issue of design. While most large tech companies have managed to master the art of web or industrial design, none (except possibly Apple) has managed to position itself as a fashion icon. Google Glass, for example, is very beautifully designed, but ignores the inherent cyborg-esque nature of putting a computer front-and-center on your face. Like it or not, our devices say a little about who we are. What does a computer strapped to your face say? Additionally, makers of smart watches and fitness trackers alike have ignored the fact that 30% of women say they would never wear a device on their wrist, either because they already wear something there they like, or because they simply refuse to wear anything there at all (Wasik, 2013). While companies like Motorola with their Moto 360 have attempted to create more fashion-forward designs, the large majority have not.
Thus, because of the various pain-points expressed by would-be consumers about wearable tech devices, the question of whether or not the public is truly interested in these devices becomes valid. Analysts seem confident in the success of this market, but consumers themselves seem wary of buying into the trend.
Methods & Analysis
Figure 1: BatchGeo Origin of Geo-tagged #Wearables Tweets
In order to effectively measure the appeal of wearable technology and particular devices both temporally and geographically, I used various tools and data sets to gather information. My first data set was extracted from Twitter. Using ScraperWiki, a tool for data-mining tweets, I retrieved tweets that contained “#wearables” over a period encompassing one month, from January 14th to February 14th. While ScraperWiki cannot access all the tweets made during the time period, it does grab a representative sample of the tweets to give us an idea about popular topics and trends. Some of these tweets were loaded with geolocation data that allowed for tracking their points of origin. Using BatchGeo, I was able to load my dataset online and use spatial-analysis to determine where each geo-tagged tweet was sent from.
Figure 2: CartoDB #Wearables Worldwide, 1/14-2/14
This proved to be the first truly revealing piece of information. As you can see in Figure 1 and Figure 2, the over 13,000 tweets regarding wearables gathered over the month proved to be rather limited in geographic origin, coming mostly from the United States and Europe.
Figure 3: #Wearables Tweets Language Breakdown
I initially attributed this to limitations of Twitter demographics and target audience for wearable tech. For one, the reach of a hashtag of english-language origins limited who would be using it. As evidenced in Figure 3, an analysis of my entire ScraperWiki dataset revealed 94% of my tweets gathered were in English. Furthermore, wearable tech, despite its previously discussed promise, is still at its essence a novelty, a commodity limited in appeal (for now) to those who can afford it. Thus, while I was not severely surprised by these results, the evidence thus far pointed to a limited appeal of wearable technologies.
Next I used the text-analysis tool Wordle to visually represent the words that most frequently appeared within my dataset of tweets; this was useful for getting a big-picture idea of what all the tweets were talking about. This
surprisingly simple tool proved extremely useful, as it provided me with my next big hint. Like Nathan Yau describes in his book “Data Points”, this visualization allowed me to look at the big picture and see a trend I otherwise would not have noticed (Yau, 2013). After removing a few outlying terms such as “RT”, “Via”, and even “#wearables”, changing the casing of the words to all lowercase, and eliminating some unrelated words, I was left with a clearer picture of what #wearables tweeters were talking about. As you can see highlighted in Figure 4, there was a significant portion of tweets dedicated to talking about fitness, healthcare, sleep-tracking and related topics. Terms highlighted in yellow were directly related to health, while those in orange were peripherally related (i.e. relevant companies). I decided I needed further evidence before drawing any conclusions.
Figure 4: Hot-Topics in #Wearables Tweets with Health-Related Terms Highlighted
Once I had extracted all I could from the ScraperWiki Twitter dataset, I moved on to using Google Trends to collect more data. Trends is able to graph the popularity of certain topics or search terms and graph them against other topics in order to analyze popularity or estimate search volume over time, all the way back to the early 2000’s in some cases. I used this to track the popularity of terms such as “Wearables”, “Wearable Technology”, “Samsung Galaxy Gear”, “iWatch”, “Fitbit”, and more. I used R to combine these various topics and create a statistical graph to analyze their popularity in groups and as a whole. What I found, as visible in Figure 5, was that interest in some of these topics, specifically “Wearables”, “Samsung Galaxy Gear”, and “Smartwatch” have been on the decline in recent months after seemingly peaking towards the end of 2013.
Figure 5: Interest in Wearables from Google Trends Data
Figure 6: General Interest in Wearables vs Interest in Health-Related Wearables
This was the first solid evidence I gathered that Wearables were on the decline in public interest. Or were they? I decided to gather one last bit of information on Google Trends—trend data relating specifically to health-related wearable tech. What I found was truly surprising: Figure 6 shows the same data as Figure 5 plotted as a line graph in red, graphed together with trend data for the more health-related terms “Fitbit”, “iWatch”, “Samsung Gear Fit”, and “Jawbone Up” in blue. What this shows is while interest for other wearables (and wearables in general) has declined, interest in these health technologies has not.
Findings
These different analytical methods allowed me to identify certain trends in the data. My BatchGeo map shows the potentially limited interest/appeal of the wearables market. My statistical graph made in R pointed to a decrease in public interest in general for wearables. However, those two visualizations did not tell the whole story. Only Wordle and further experimentation through Google Trends were able to demonstrate how interest in health-related wearable technologies were growing despite the general trends in the opposite direction.
Discussion
The growing interest in digital health and health-related wearable technologies speaks tells us a number of things regarding technology in the modern era. For one, the smartphone has a place in modern times and likely won’t be eclipsed by wearable tech. Despite the growing interest in these technologies, people are not as interested in the smart watch segment that brings cell phone functionality to your wrist. Sonny Vu, CEO of Misfit Wearables, says the current widely-held vision for wearables is that they’re smartphones you can wear on your wrist, and that’s not what people want, a sentiment corroborated by my data.
Additionally, wearables are uniquely positioned to affect peoples’ health-habits positively. By being constantly somewhere on your body, wearables are able to track things like diet, exercise, heart-rate, and more. What’s more, the data collected reveals that people are seeking out these health-tracking devices, perhaps to help them be more aware of their own positive and negative habits. The data potentially provided by these sensors is not only powerful due to potential gamification—imagine competing with your friends for better health-stats—but also useful to health insurance companies, who could reward people with positive habits, as well as healthcare providers, who could more accurately provide highly-personalized diagnoses and treatments.
And many companies are already taking advantage of this: mobile apps like Zocdoc hope to make fortune connecting patients with doctors in their area. Devices like Lark help you monitor your sleep patterns and analyze your quality of sleep over time. Other devices like Foc.us claim to help improve your focus simply by wearing the device and allowing it to send tiny, imperceptible shocks to your brain. The number of apps claiming to monitor your sleep and wake you up during the right part of your sleep cycle has skyrocketed in recent months.
Which brings up an interesting note: it seems the larger, established players in the tech field (Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) have for the most part stayed out of the health wearables game. This leaves room for other companies like Nike to enter in with wearable health devices, and increasingly, small companies like Fitbit, Jawbone and even others you’ve never heard of like Foc.us, Lark or Zeo. While Apple is rumored to be working on a very health-centered wearable, they’ve managed to stay out of this potentially lucrative market. After year of the Galaxy Gear, Samsung announced its Gear Fit specifically aimed at the fitness arena, though it has yet to release sales numbers for this device. Google, meanwhile, is probably even farther away from a fitness wearable: it’s highly-rumored Google contact lens is likely several years away at best.
Conclusion
Wearable technology, by anyone’s measure, stands poised to be the next big thing in technology. Such a young field always contains room for potential shifts in focus, however. While companies march ahead designing devices like the next-generation Pebble Steel and Samsung Gear Smartwatch, people are starting to solidify their desires for a device that, more than providing access to notifications and social sharing, also monitors their health and provides an analysis of this data. While it is important not to fall into a trap of over-analyzing data for more than it is worth, in this case, more market research seems to be necessary on the parts of the various wearable technology companies that currently are not fulfilling the needs of consumers (Pentland, 2014). People want health wearables, and the big players are not providing.
In many ways, the wearables field adds to the growing important of data visualizations; these various sensors can pick up all kinds of data, but without a useful way of representing its significance, it becomes next to impossible to interpret what it means at a glance. Similarly, my data tracking interest in wearables required visual representations in order to become useful information. Based on this research, the next successful wearable device will not be one that simply replaces your smartphone, but rather one that can monitor your health activity and provide useful insight through real-time interpretation. As Lee reminds us within her book, Facebook Nation, much more public interest data than I was able to retrieve is available to these tech giants for nominal fees. The question is, how long will it take them to act on it?
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