Garmin is a major player in the fitness wearables marketplace, mostly at the higher end. Last week at Mobile World Congress, the company showed upgrades to Vivofit and Vivoactive, two of its less pricey smartwatch fitness products. The Vivoactive HR has all the features of the original Vivoactive, including tracking runs, steps, and sleep, and has sports apps. The new HR … [Read more...]
Smart Watch Sales Outpace Swiss Watch Sales
The market research company Strategy Analytics is reporting that, for the first time, more smart watches were sold in the last quarter of 2015 than Swiss watches, by a margin of 8.1 million to 7.9 million. The company said that the smart watch market grew 316 percent from the year previous, while sales of Swiss watches declined 5 percent. Analysts estimated that 8 out of 10 … [Read more...]
GSMA Introduces eSIM for Wearables, Other Devices
The GSMA is the international organization that's in charge of the global wireless standard GSM and its offshoots like LTE; if your phone (or tablet) uses a SIM card, it's running GSM. It's also the group that runs next week's Mobile World Congress. There are two problems with SIM cards: they're huge for electronic components, and they're tied to specific carriers. In … [Read more...]
Apple Watch App Keeps Drivers Awake at the Wheel
Falling asleep at the wheel and driving drowsy are major issues for the transportation industry, and a couple of companies are looking to wearables to alleviate the problem. One, which we've written about, is the SmartCap monitoring system, developed in Australia. Another is an app for the Apple Watch being developed by PeopleNet, a company specializing in fleet management … [Read more...]
NPD Says Fitbit Dominates the Fitness Tracker Market
Fitbit sells 8 out of every 10 fitness trackers, the market research company NPD says. By the end of 2015, nearly 33 million trackers had been sold in the United States, compared to 13 million smartwatches -- a figure that might come as a disappointment to the industry analysts who had been predicting global Apple Watch sales of 21 million last year. However, consumers … [Read more...]
Survey Says Runners Want Great GPS and Heart Monitors
A survey of runners at the online community Athlete IQ found that peer and expert recommendations were the most important factors in deciding which wearable tech to get -- and that functionality far outtrumped price. The site asked 732 marathoners, triathletes, and steeplechasers about what tech they used and why. About 84 percent said functionality was the most important … [Read more...]
Oral Roberts Students Are Required to Wear Fitbits
Oral Roberts University has long had a fitness requirement for first-year students but a written activity log sufficed until this academic year. Now, all 900 incoming freshmen have to wear Fitbit trackers (which they have to buy) and share the data with the school. The Tulsa World newspaper (Oral Roberts is in Tulsa, OK) reports that professors had previously been required … [Read more...]
Tech Takes on the Test Audience with “Revenant”
Over the years, Hollywood hype pushers have called movies riveting, thrilling, gripping, insert-your-own -ing here. Now the hypesters have some technology to back up their claims: 20th Century Fox recently used wearable tech wristbands on 100 audience members watching test screenings for the December 2015 release Revenant to gauge audience reaction. According to the … [Read more...]
Dr. Doolittle to Be Replaced by Technology
Anicall, a Japanese firm, has debuted an as yet unnamed pet translation device at the Wearable Expo in Tokyo. The collar, which will be available for both dogs and cats, analyzes 40 movements. Billed as something like a pet telepathy machine, it actually just tells your in-the-immediate-vicinity smartphone whether the pet is excited or happy, relaxed, wanting to play, or … [Read more...]
Juniper Says Fitness Trackers Will Outpace Smart Watches Until 2018
The well-respected Juniper Research is out with its latest wearables report -- this one estimating that fitness trackers will continue to be the largest category in wearables until people figure out a use case for smart watches. That will take, Juniper estimates, a couple of years. But it's in the fine print where Juniper's findings get interesting. In a white paper … [Read more...]