Nowadays, if you’re not sporting a FitBit, FuelBand or Gear Fit then you are out of the loop.
It seems like everyone is clipping or zipping on a mobile fitness accessory to monitor vitals and track daily activities. The idea here is that every step you take is visible and available for scrutiny by yourself and your entire social circle, a technique obviously meant to shame even the most sedentary into some form of physical wellness.
Whether it’s to fit into the crowd, to monitor health, or for just to make your daily jog more interesting, FitBits and the like are catching on, no question about it. But while fitness trackers come in all shapes and sizes, but it’s the sensors in these tiny gadgets that really make them tick.
These sensors measure physical elements and convert that raw data into information that we can understand, such as heart rate, temperature and even blood sugar level. Increasing demand for more and more sensitive sensors is driving some incredible market growth in the Global Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market, which is projected to grow at a CAGR of 40.29 percent from 2014-2018.
Prominence of Lifestyle Diseases Will Be a Main Driver for Market Growth
As most of us are already aware, a toxic combination of increasingly sedentary lifestyles and unhygienic foods, not to mention aging populations worldwide are leading to many more incidents of lifestyle diseases in all demographics.
Globally, there are approximately 380 million adults between the ages of 20 and 79 suffering from diabetes. This accounts for nine percent of the global adult population. Nine percent. And this number is far from maxed. In fact, it’s expected to increase at an alarming rate in the next 10 years. If that number alone doesn’t faze you, then think of it this way; in the US alone the cost of diabetes (in 2012) was US$245 billion.
While the numbers paint a pretty bleak picture, increasing awareness of the health ramifications of a sedentary lifestyle are definitely creeping into the public consciousness. In this vein, anything that encourages folks to get up and move will be hugely beneficial to the overall healthcare sector in coming years, a fact that is buoying the prospects for the mobile health and fitness sensor market.
And these sensors have far wider reaching applications than just fitness: They can be used by healthcare providers to remotely monitor patients, thereby decreasing stress on the medical system and providing round-the-clock patient monitoring without the need for constant hospital visits.
Health and Fitness Sensors Poised to Become the Next ‘Can’t Live Without it’ Tech
We’ve already mentioned the FitBit, but thanks to the decreasing size of mobile health and fitness sensors, they are popping up in all manner of devices.
Google’s futuristic smart lenses would use nano sensors to measure glucose levels from tears and transmit this data wirelessly to a connected device—a huge step forward for those living with diabetes. And miniaturization will also allow integration into everyday devices like smartphones and watches, in order to collect consistent, real-time health information for all patients.
Fitness wearables might seem like a bit of a fad at the moment, but the entry of big players like Google, Microsoft and Amazon into the wearable health sensor market definitely points to more concrete staying power.
Furthermore, the overall business model of the market is shifting from sensors with their own protocols, interfaces and related applications, to open system models that can interact with a range of devices, allowing for better interoperability and more varied uses for these devices.
And while some may continue to use mobile health devices to draw dicks on their morning run route, the Global Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market looks like it’s on the cusp of evolving, with applications aimed and providing better, more complete healthcare to populations worldwide.
