Specialized wearables such as smart athletic wear, connected sneakers and hearing-based wearables are expected to surge over the next four years, outpacing the growth of conventional fitness trackers.
Connected clothes and ear-based wearables, coined “hearables,” are forecast to climb 550 percent over the next four years, from 4.5 million in 2018 to nearly 30 million in 2022, according to a new report from consumer technology industry tracker Juniper Research.
While conventional trackers still comprise a vast majority of overall fitness-related sales, specialized fitness wearables are projected to grow 25 times faster. Through 2022, traditional trackers such as fitness bands and smartwatches are projected to increase just 20 percent.
As growth of basic trackers has continued to slow, session-specific wearables, such as specialized devices that are used specifically to monitor gym or training sessions, has multiplied, according to Juniper.
Those include devices from companies like Under Armour, which recently announced a running sneaker that automatically tracks pace and cadence; Sensoria, which makes a line of smart garments; as well as exercise-specific devices from Gymwatch, Atlas and Jabra that provide more granular workout metrics without the additional messaging and call-handling functions of general wearables.
As those devices with more detailed health and fitness metrics become more widespread, Juniper researchers believe that lifestyle trackers, such as Fitbit bands and devices manufactured by Xiaomi partner Huami in China, will see a decline in market share.
Get The Latest Sports Tech News In Your Inbox!
By 2022, Juniper expects that Fitbit and Huami will together account for 28 percent of total fitness wearable shipments, down from more than 40 percent in 2017.
Farther into the future, Juniper believes that fitness trackers will altogether become device-agnostic and that software platforms designed to pull in data (no matter where it comes from) for analyzation purposes will ultimately become the next major battleground among vendors in fitness.
This is sort of what has been occurring over the past few years in the broader smartphone market. While consumers once used to have particular preferences for the type of branded hardware they used, they have shifted their focus on the software platform that powers the devices themselves.
For professional athletes, one could see how devices that track a wide set of different health and fitness metrics would be most beneficial if processed through a single software platform that makes sense of that data in real time, enabling coaches to tweak workout regimens to optimize performance.