One in Every Five Wearable Wireless Devices Set for Healthcare Deployment by 2017

Small footprint, low-cost, low-power, and standardized wireless connectivity embedded in wearable devices will transform the lives and activities of millions of consumers and patients over the next five years as wearable wireless-enabled devices increasingly track an individual’s activity and condition.

A new wave of wearable devices are coming to market that will help track and share data from a range of activities and conditions. These devices will track the pace of someone’s daily run, recognize a fall that might have injured a senior, report the blood sugar level in a diabetic, and monitor the heart rate of a patient in hospital.

“The breadth of the potential for this market is not just drawing in consumer giants like Nike and Adidas and established healthcare players such as GE Healthcare and Philips, but a wealth of start-ups and specialist players looking to wearable wireless devices to enable a wide range of networked health applications and services,” says Jonathan Collins, principal analyst, navigation, telematics & M2M.

Over the next five years, the market for wearable wireless devices will grow to 169.5 million devices in 2017, up from 20.77 million in 2011, a CAGR of 41%. While the bulk of the device shipments will be in the consumer-oriented sports, fitness, and wellness market, wearable devices will increasingly be adopted across home monitoring and healthcare service applications as well.

“Remote patient monitoring and on-site professional healthcare use will represent just over 20 percent of the wearable wireless device market by 2017, up from less than half that in 2011. “As the devices can be worn and can upload collected data to the network automatically, collected data can not only be more regularly collected but also shared, analyzed, and acted on quicker and more efficiently that existing wired or manpower-laden techniques,” says Collins.