The Future of Wearables

After spending about a decade experimenting with form and function, wearables have hit a bottleneck. One minor challenge is the uncool factor which often influences our adoption of things that affect the way we look. Ordinary optical glasses, so common and even sometimes cool now, were basically unacceptable two hundred years ago. Another challenge is our expectation to use electronic devices for long stretches with minimal recharging requirements. And yet we also want these wearables to be small or thin which conflicts with the idea of a long-lived battery. And yet the most significant hurdle wearables must overcome is the ability to quickly deliver meaningful insight and advice. We don’t really want rafts of step or heart-rate data -- we want the insights that data affords. But these insights are dependent upon big bandwidth, and AI, which will become evermore critical as wearables increasingly take the form of augmented reality glasses (the smartphone’s heir). It will take us 10 to 15 years to bui