Wearable technology is on a collision course with the Internet of everything. The recent Apple Healthbook and Google’s Android Wear, combined with Motorola’s Moto 360 news are taking the wearable space to the next level. Apple Healthbook demonstrates the powerful insights about ourselves that wearables could deliver.
Once the data is pulled into the platform, it can find correlations and trends and not only display its meaning in the historical sense, but make predictions that can give us even greater, more proactive insights about ourselves and how to improve our lives. It also confirms something we have known for a while: that the real winners will be the platform players that can leverage their channels and deliver services beyond just fitness.
At the same time, the promise of Android Wear is that it creates opportunities for new apps and services that will help create value for consumers at an accelerated speed. If you compare wearables to the evolution of the smartphone, we started with the brick phone, which was all about proving out the technology with little consideration of aesthetics and user experience.
Fast forward to the iPhone, which became mainstream when the app store enabled new services and experiences on top of the phone device, from useless ones like Flappy Bird to indispensable ones like Maps. The same is happening with Android Wear. It’s turning wearables into a platform for delivery of a wide range of new services. In fact, it has the potential to change the way we interact with our technology altogether.