Active Technology and Accessories

Introduction

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact on the global economy, wearable sales totalled approximately 400 million units in 2020; a near 15 per cent increase from the previous year (International Data Corporation, 2020). The vast majority of these sales in 2020 are hearables: wireless headphones and earphones offering features such as fitness tracking, smart assistants, and language translation. An additional 91 million smart watches and 68 million smart wrist-bands were sold by companies such as Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei, Fitbit, and Garmin topping the sales categories in 2020.

These devices generate an enormous amount of data related to health and fitness. Soon, a tenth of humanity will produce data with wearables. Today, tracking heart rate, speed and distance, or daily step counts from these devices are among the most basic of functions. With such data, a profound research and development potential has been created, both from the user’s and the providers’ perspectives. From a user’s perspective, these wearables offer the opportunity to evaluate their personal data in the sports and fitness area, to analyze data over time, to share data with friends, training partners, and even their primary health-care providers. One may compare themselves with other (even elite) athletes, to find virtual training partners from the surrounding area or across the globe, or to exchange training programs with other athletes and coaches worldwide.

This data is also useful from a research and health-care perspective. It allows coaches, and sports science/medicine practitioners to monitor training intensity and training loads, often in real time, to detect training or lifestyle-related fatigue, and to detect the onset of disease (often before symptom-onset). The latter feature is particularly appealing during and following the global COVID-19 pandemic: wearables will enable telehealth between user and primary health-care provider(s) via remote patient monitoring, making healthcare services more accessible, timely and cost efficient. A key benefit of telehealth is its ability to drive positive patient experience and eliminate access barriers to offer patient-centric and convenient care. Wearables will also play a key role in precision medicine by providing physicians better knowledge of patients’ health since patient data are continuously collected and analyzed, throughout the day and night. Integration of sensors such as physiological sensors and biochemical sensors will provide continuous monitoring of a patient’s vital signs and timely clinical decisions can be taken such as therapy modifications based on subtle changes observed in health patterns.

Wearables also have the potential to transform the fields of biomechanics and engineering by enabling researchers to measure real-world movement outside of the lab or clinical setting (Chambers et al., 2015; Havens et al., 2018; Hullfish et al., 2019; Peppoloni et al., 2014). This real-world data can be analyzed to quantify sports performance (Camomilla et al., 2018), movement disorders (Johansson et al., 2018), gait analysis (Rebula et al., 2013) and injury risk (Matijevich et al., 2019; Sheerin et al., 2019). Indeed, integration of data from multiple sensors worn by the user at the same time, along with the possibility of machine-learning algorithms to analyze and interpret this data, offers the exciting potential of wearable devices to monitor, assess and intervene in movement analysis across multiple real-world settings (Matijevich et al., 2020).

Here, we aim to describe the use of wearables within the active economy. We will evaluate the historical background of the sector, the function of various wearable devices and evaluate the utility of these devices in the athletic, clinical, rehabilitation and medical communities. Together, we contend that the active technology and accessories sector will impact the lives of the wearer as well as third-party users, such as physicians and researchers who can gain access to enormous amounts of data by millions of users world-wide related to their movement patterns, amount of physical activity and physiological vital signs. Ultimately, this will lead to tangible and intangible economic, societal, and human value.