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Wearable technology constitutes a touchpoint across technological trends, including mobile, big data, the Internet of Things, and virtual/augmented/mixed reality (Tarabasz & Poddar, 2019). According to Globe Newswire (2022), the value of the wearable technology market reached over $100 billion in 2021 and is predicted to reach about $380 billion by 2028, seeing a three-fold increase. Wearable fitness devices are one of the important digital transformations that will affect business and consumer interactions. During the past decade, different wearable fitness or health gadgets have taken the consumer market. More and more consumers are wearing smart watches, wristbands (e.g., Pebble and Fitbit), and body metric textile (Swan, 2012). Wearables are a particular form of the Internet of Things; they are connected to the Internet by linking to a smartphone or via sensors embedded in the device (Canhoto & Arp, 2017; O’Brien, 2015). These devices provide tracking capabilities and storage of health and fitness indicators and statistics, including body temperature, steps, heart rate, and sleep (Weber, 2015). Largely because of the quantified-self movement (Paluch & Tuzovic, 2019), about 78 million U.S. consumers adopted wearables in 2021, and the number will surpass 90 million by 2024, reaching 25.5% of the U.S. population (Phaneuf, 2023). Such steady growth does not imply that we should take the widespread adoption of wearables for granted (Babič et al., 2021). To capture the remaining consumer segments, this project addresses the following research question: What makes consumers adopt wearables?
There is a growing research interest surrounding wearable fitness devices, including the adoption and use (e.g., Kalantari, 2017; Grosová et al., 2022; Liu & Han, 2020), intermittent discontinuance (Shen et al., 2018), and continued use (Zhang & Mao, 2022). Studies have revealed the influencing factors such as perceived ease of use (e.g., Kim & Chiu, 2019), perceived usefulness (e.g., Cheung et al., 2021; Kim & Chiu, 2019; Felea et al., 2021), visibility - the extent to which a technology is apparent in the sense of sight of observable to others (Chuah, 2019), and social influences - the effect of the social surroundings on individual consumers (e.g., Cheung et al., 2019). Those factors have shown to have positive effects on the acceptance/adoption of wearables. In studies of consumer use intentions, researchers have found the following significant factors: attitude, perceived usefulness, and design aesthetics (Kim & Shin, 2015; Muller & Klerk, 2020; Felea et al., 2021). The meta-analysis has been conducted to reveal that most of the key variables identified in the studies have significant effect sizes in their relations to attitudes and adoption intention (Chiu & Cho 2021; Gopinath et al., 2022) and that the technological characteristic typically had stronger positive effects on adoption than consumer characteristics (Peng et al., 2021).