Wearable Technology: Explained.

There a lot of upcoming interesting technologies and wearable technology is at the forefront of this revolution. You'd be forgiven for wondering what the fuss about wearable tech is, given the explosion of smartwatches, fitness trackers, sports watches and other connected devices in 2014. Put simply, wearables are the biggest new innovation in technology since the smartphone – and the possibilities are endless.

Over the last months wearable tech has gone mainstream, and the hottest devices on the planet are now ones you can place on your wrists, arms and faces.

So what is this wearable technology revolution? 

Lets find out:

While the clue’s in the name, it doesn't quite tell the whole story. Wearable technology is clearly gadgets you wear, but there are important distinctions. Wearable tech isn't a trendy pair of headphones, for example, or a digital watch.

The new age of wearables tap into the connected self; they're laden with smart sensors, and make use of a web connection, usually using Bluetooth to connect wirelessly to your smartphone. They use these sensors to connect to you as a person, and they help you to achieve goals such as staying fit, active, losing weight or being more organised.

Most wearables are wrist worn, but an increasing number can be clipped to the body and hung around the neck. Wearables are quickly blending with jewellery, and are worn in the same way. Watches, rings, pendents – you name it, there's a wearable that does it.

Different types of wearables:

There are a few different categories of wearables at the moment. Some products manage to get their feet in more than one camp and a few others define new categories all of their own. 

Smartwatches:

Smartwatches are wrist-worn devices that connect to your mobile phone to act as mini-windows onto your digital life. Telling the time is simply an after-thought of these wrist watches; they'll tell you about the notifications of calls, messages and usually email and social media as well. They basically relay the most significant of the data from your phone to your wrist for quick actions.

Samsung, Motorola, LG and Sony have been at them for a while and the recent introduction of Apple Watch is expected to take the game a little further at least in this generation.
While some feel smartwatches to be attractive, very few actually find them useful. But the things can only get better.

Fitness Trackers:

Fitness trackers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and levels of sophistication too. Usually worn on the wrist or clipped to a belt, they're generally bands or watches of some sort which will keep a count of the number of steps you make each day. The newest bands are adding continuous heart rate monitoring, for even more accurate data on your calorific burn and exercise. 

This landscape, too, has been seeing a lot of competitors. The most popular ones being Fitbit, a lot of startups are participating to provide affordable fitness bands.

Sports watches:

For those active types who love running, cycling, swimming and more a dedicated sports watch should be at the top of your wearable wish list. These devices should have GPS (don't be suckered into one that isn't, it won't be accurate) and can provide another level of information about your chosen sport, and take your training to the next level.

These are basically Fitness Trackers in a Smart Watch shell that don't require a smartphone to work. These are  more of standalone kinds of devices than accessories.

Head-Mounted Displays:

If you want some kind of virtual information delivered right to your eyes, then a head-mounted display (HMD) is what you'll need. Some are designed to block out the rest of the world, like Oculus Rift, and present a computer-generated virtual reality to fool your brain into thinking it's somewhere else entirely. Others would rather just act as an overlay of information on top of what's already there like Google Glass or other so-called smartglasses. Another example of a head mounted displays is the Microsoft HoloLens about which you can read here.

Smart Clothing:

Smart clothing is a rather broad category which encompasses both garments with electronics in that make them look more interesting or fashionable, as well as clothing that essentially appears normal but houses additional functionality. It's predicted that over the next few years a lot of the features in fitness trackers will find their way to smart garments. You won't find a lot of options in this category right now as it will take a few years to develop to be sold at a retail level.

Smart jewellry :

Brands like Kovert Designs have brought the idea of smartwatches to items of jewellery finding ground somewhere between the two. Smart jewellery is mostly aimed at women right now, and the most common usage is to discreetly notify the user of texts, calls or emails when their phone is out of reach.

The big players in wearable tech:

So far, it's largely the smaller companies that are making the better name for themselves in the wearable tech space.

Jawbone, Fitbit, Misfit and Withings have had huge successes with fitness trackers for the masses. TomTom, Garmin, Polar and Suunto make some of the very best sports watches for running, swimming, cycling, hiking and even skiing and golf.

With smartwatches, it's more about your traditional multinational tech brands with Sony, Samsung, Motorola, LG  and now, Apple.

As for headgear, Oculus Rift is the big name in virtual reality although the Microsoft HoloLens is a very interesting idea in personal computing and not just virtual reality. Google Glass was a player in AR glasses but it remains to be seen if and what the second iteration of the project ends up looking like.

So, what's the problem?

Wearables are getting very good at measuring us. They can record your heart rate, body fat composition, perspiration, health, temperature and muscle activity all by just touching your skin as well as movement, distance and speed using GPS, accelerometers and gyroscopes.

However, a weakness is still interpreting the results. The key to that interpretation lies in hoards of expert medical, sports, photographic and all sorts of other professional opinion to come up with the right kind of software and algorithms to extract the salient trends and markers of what's going on when we run, swim, play golf, make food choices or take thousands of daily pictures without wanting to manually edit them all.

Once they know how to do that, then these wearables will become highly effective life coaches rather than just items of curiosity.

What do you think about wearables? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Thanks!