The increasing popularity of fitness-focused wearable devices is set to combine with a growing connected clothing market to hugely boost spending over the new five years, according to analyst figures out today.
A new study from Juniper Research has predicted that the fitness wearables sector will generate over $10 billion (£6.5bn) in hardware revenues by 2020, up from an estimated $3.3 billion ($2.16bn) this year.
This tripling effect will be largely driven by the sales of wrist-based trackers (such as the Microsoft Band 2, picture below), while hundreds of thousands of connected garments used by professional sports teams showcase wearable technology’s most advanced capabilities.
Professional sports organisations will also begin to use this information to drive more in-depth viewer engagement, helping fans get closer to sports action than ever before.
However, the question of who owns this data could become troublesome, as owners or organisations look to sell it to the highest bidder without claiming consent from the players or even the public themselves.
“Without clear boundaries for data ownership and use, biometrics could become part of sports players’ contracts, and even dictate initial hiring practices through predictive analytics,” noted research author James Moar.
“While wearables companies involved in corporate wellness have been very careful to ensure employers can only see aggregate data and that workers can opt out, pro sports have no such safeguards.”
Juniper’s figures are much higher than some other analyst estimates released earlier this year, with research firm Parks Associates estimating that the fitness tracker market will grow from $2 billion in 2014 to $5.4 billion by 2019.
Suits you? Try our Wearable Tech quiz!
'Unexpected behaviour' of Waymo's self-driving vehicles triggers investigation by American safety regulators
Group of TikTok creators in the United States attempt to block recent law that will…
Hundreds of climate activists clashed with police outside Tesla gigafactory near Berlin, in protest over…
AI very much the focus at Google's annual developer conference, including Google Gemini and a…
Co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to leave OpenAI, after role in Sam Altman's firing…
Electric vehicles made in China are now subject to a 100 percent tariff, to protect…