For the last few years, since wearables became small enough to be convenient, the wrist has been the most frequent commercial battleground. There are, of course, hundreds of fitness bands and trackers that sit on your wrist because, well, people are used to wearing things on their wrists.
But is that really the best place? Maybe not.
The site FashNerd makes a strong case that most functions of wearables are better suited to the ear. It’s easier to take your temperature and heart rate in the ear, and it may be simpler to create accurate motion algorithms for a head-worn device than it is for a wrist-worn one. An ear device can be a speaker and a mic more effectively than a watch can (Dick Tracy, anyone?). A cunning programmer would be able to couple a body-worn camera with an earpiece to prompt business people about the people they were seeing/meeting.
Ear devices wouldn’t work as traditionally as a timepiece, but putting tracker functions in the ear rather than the wrist would free up wrists for watch fans; if your wristpiece is a timepiece and notification device and not a fitness tracker, wearers may be more willing to swap out their watch as the mood strikes them.
Battery life is an issue — earpieces don’t have as much room for power as watches — as is comfort and design. But FashNerd makes some interesting points, and they’re worth paying attention to.