By Adam Wakefield

A very different slap on the wrist

Ben Wagner, chief marketing warrior at digital marketing agency NATIVE VML, says when it comes to wearable technology, the wrist has proven to be the most attractive area for companies to target. This is borne out by the growth of health and fitness activity trackers, as well as smartwatches.

“2015 saw 39.5 million US adults 18 and over using wearable devices, an increase of 57.7% over 2014 in sales of smart watches and fitness trackers in the USA,” Wagner says. “Growth is forecast for 81.7 million adults using wearables by 2018. The wrist is the perfect ‘real estate’ given that watches have dominated this part of our body for so long, which supports the ‘glanceable’ behaviour that wearables ultimately utilise.”

Stuart Thomas, senior journalist at technology news portal memeburn, says the potential for growth in wearables was “massive”. 
 
“You only have to look at how smartphones have changed our media consumption habits to see that – so much so that they’ve become prosthetic extensions of ourselves,” Thomas says. “So far, wearables haven’t been able to do much in terms of media consumption, in the mainstream at least, apart from smartwatches, which allow people to receive notifications without getting sucked into their phones.”

Thomas makes the point that wearables should be seen as a distinct category of their own, with 2016 likely to see fitness trackers, as earlier alluded to by Wagner, and smartwatches coming into their own.

“Next, we will see other smart wearables that connect with interfaces of some sort – most likely smartphones at first.”

That being said, supporting technologies, especially in terms of media production, still had some way to go.

Wearables and social media 

According to Larry Alton, a blogger, writer and business consultant, wearable technology is already emerging as the next “inevitable game-changer” in the tech world.

In an article for the Huffington Post, Alton says in early 2015, more than 20% of American adults owned a wearable device. 

With the popularity of communications technology such as smart watches likely to “explode”, the ways in which the smart watches and other wearable’s devices are used will gradually evolve to better suit the device, with those changes to have a significant effect on the scope of social media how businesses use that to interact with their customers.

Just one such aspect was voiced-based updates, among others, that Alton touches on.

“The shift from PDAs with pullout keyboards to smartphones with on-screen touch-based keyboards was significant, but the shift that will come with wearable tech will be even greater,” Alton says.

“Because screen sizes will shrink down even further, users will no longer be able to type as conveniently as they used to. Instead, it's likely that they will rely on voice recognition to create and submit messages.”

New technology brings new privacy questions

The digitisation of society has raised with it important questions of privacy, who has access to users’ data, and what do those who compile such data do with it. When it comes to wearables, the same important questions apply. 

“You can be guaranteed that hackers are targeting wearables right now, given that most devices use Bluetooth technology which has a few security flaws, which will be targeted as an entry point into smartphones potentially,” Wagner says.

Like Wagner, Thomas says we are seeing such exploitation already.

“At the beginning of the year, a hacker figured out a way to access people's passwords based on data recorded from the wrist movements of smartwatch wearers,” Thomas says. “Once wearables include standalone GPS and internet-capable technologies, the information on them becomes much more valuable and open to attack.”

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