Fitness: Is ‘wearable tech’ here to stay?

Why “anyone would want to be all wired up all the time” is beyond me, said John C. Dvorak in PCMag.com. The latest trend in “wearable tech” includes gadgets and sensors that record everything from “your elevated heart rate and your blood sugar levels” to your sleeping patterns and daily mileage. “Many people are hooking themselves up to wearable and costly self-analysis sensors and monitoring everything,” often with a mystifyingly obsessive sense of mission. Remind me, again, what all this proves? Especially among users who are “in their 20s and 30s and are hardly at risk for any sort of medical problem,” this fad has become just a new form of competition to satisfy our egos. The bottom line is that “wearable tech is just an expensive joke,” and the joke’s on us.

The inventors of wearable tech need to focus more on outcomes, said Craig Hajduk in Wired.com. “While the data itself might be interesting at first, people purchase those products to make a meaningful difference in their lives.” That’s not easy to deliver. Companies designing wearable tech will have to “start thinking about the emotional connection and value users will actually place on them,” not just their utility. That’s where design comes into play. By “carefully selecting distribution partners” with the right brand and reach, wearable tech products will find their niche.

Count Under Armour in, said Owen Thomas in ReadWrite.com. The exercise-clothing company just paid $150 million to acquire MapMyFitness, a popular fitness-tracking app. It’s easy to compare the company’s new electronic departure with the older one of Nike, which now “offers a vertically integrated stack of hardware, software, and services” through products like FuelBand and Nike+. But apps like MapMyFitness are a different beast altogether. Instead of a closed system, its “open technology platform” will allow the software to connect with hundreds of hardware devices and other software apps, potentially turning it into the “Android of fitness.”

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And this is just the beginning, said Rip Empson in TechCrunch.com. “The market for fitness apps, devices, and services, while emergent, has been growing like gangbusters.” Under Armour joins companies like Nike, Fitbit, Jawbone, and Adidas, all competing for a piece of the same pie. No doubt, giants like Google and Apple will soon join the list, too. As sensors and technology improve, the line “will continue to blur” between health-tracking devices and clothing, “providing plenty of opportunity for these capital-rich companies.”