Wearable medical devices to surge in 2017

According to ABI Research, wearable devices will once again take on the market by 2017. 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 market research firm added that the devices are set to take a sizeable portion of the wearable wireless devices market.

"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 startups and specialist players looking to wearable wireless devices to enable a wide range of networked health applications and services," stated Jonathan Collins, principal analyst, navigation, telematics & M2M, ABI Research

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 percent. 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," added Collins.

- Julien Happich
??EE Times