How’s India Wearing the Wearables?
Growing demands of wearable technology has become a basic requirement for all of us. If you see, there are lots of people in our surrounding who wear some kind of fitness tracker, health watches, heart beat or blood pressure calculator, etc. These kinds of technology have motion sensors that take the snapshot of your day to day activity and sync them with mobile devices or laptop computers. It can be comfortably worn on a body. Now, the time of smartphone has upgraded into a new version and it is the biggest innovation for today’s generation. So, BISInfotech in its latest edition focusing on wearable electronics and its demands. In this exclusive article, Vishal Gondal, Founder & CEO, GOQii and Sanket Patel, Director- Marketing & Business Development, Glide Technology talks with Nitisha Dubey about the importance of Wearable Technology and its scope for future.
Indian Market for Wearables Technology
The India wearables market has shown steadfast growth with another record year as the shipments of wearables devices saw an impressive 168.3% year-over-year (YoY) growth in 2019, closing the year with 14.9 million units, according to the recent data from the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, 4Q19.
While emphasizing the growth of tech wearables in Indian market Vishal Gondal from GOQii says, GOQii is India’s largest selling fitness tracker with highest market share in the wearable industry. GOQii retained its leadership position with 20.8% share in the Indian wearable market according to a recent IDC finding in January 2020. The growth trajectory in the Indian wearables market will continue to ascend strongly due to its high demand by users. Given the ongoing pandemic, health has taken CenterStage, hence the need for fitness’ wearables will only increase further.
Glide Technology’s Sanket Patel noticed huge adoption of wearables around the world. He says, Indian Consumers also have adopted on-body tech devices in the day-to-day life. Startup ecosystem of India is also taking this opportunity to come up with different use cases and developing innovative products in the Wearable space. Indian Consumers are becoming conscious about fitness & healthcare parameters as well as safety. They are open to try out different wearables available in the market.
Different sectors and demands
Wearables have gained a lot of popularity and their demand is increasing day by day. Major companies are focusing to make new wearables products and engaging its customers with advance features.
While sharing his prospective towards demand of wearables, Patel said, wearable technology is poised for massive growth and seeing continuous innovation in the domain of fitness, health, security, safety – women, child, elderly, lifestyle and so on. In the time of Covid-19 Pandemic, start-ups are developing wearables for tracking coronavirus positive people, their activities and location history.
The usage of wearables is seen in the workplace, corporates as well as other industries also. Healthcare and manufacturing have seen an exponential growth in wearable tech as a means of boosting productivity, reducing errors and communicating large amounts of data remotely, shared Gondal.
He also added, Law enforcement is the latest upcoming industry due to Covid-19. Policemen are at the frontline battling the virus, and hence are open to using fitness smart bands as a preventive measure. Recently, Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar donated GOQii Vital 3.0 smart bands to the Mumbai and Nashik police.
Challenges & Scopes
For any businesses, hands free nature becomes quit useful. Tracking the emergency and rescue team becomes easy thus making the workplace more efficient and safe. Hands-free access to important data and information through smart glasses and smart watches helps researcher, engineers, and technicians to be more efficient at their work.
Due to rising awareness and soaring healthcare costs people are also coming to terms with the fact that prevention is better than cure. Users are now welcoming options that can assist them in leading a healthy lifestyle which in turn has opened new growth avenues for fitness and preventive healthcare players. There has been a paradigm shift from curative care to preventive healthcare. There is a lot of momentum in the Indian market, thus the industry will be able to sustain the level of growth over the coming years, elaborated Gondal.
The need of wearable electronics is gradually covering all over the market. But, the problem is how much it is going to sustain in the market.
Citing on the challenges in Indian market Gondal stated, the Indian market showcases huge potential in the wearables, one of the challenges is to manufacture in India. GOQii have recently launched the GOQii Vital 3, the world’s first smart wrist band that can detect body temperature, an early symptom of COVID-19 infection. And, now with the PM Narendra Modi’s clarion call to be Vocal to be Local, GOQii has plans to explore manufacturing it in India.
While agreeing on the same topic, Patel said, Indian wearable market is price-sensitive, where majority of consumers prefer wearable priced below INR 5000. Importing sensors as well as manufacturing the final product outside India makes the base price of Wearable costly.
According to him, price-point and lack of infrastructure for manufacturing are biggest challenges for producing and selling wearables in India.
Latest Trends
The wearable devices are already seeing lots of innovations, they are not only just tracking and monitoring devices. In the current time, there is an urgent need for the start-up and technology communities around the world to innovate around solutions for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gondal said the development of rapid wearable diagnostic tools to identify and isolate COVID-19 cases, as well as solutions for remote monitoring of suspected or asymptomatic cases, will be critical to humanity’s long-term success against the virus. Machine learning algorithms are allowing the transformation of simple sensor input into more actionable health or activity data. The algorithms are collecting data and analysing the information that results in health outcomes. Such a technological breakthrough will be a step ahead in preventive healthcare that is the need of the hour.
Patel shared, growth of Wearables in the healthcare field is tremendous, we are also observing traction for wearable with different sensors such as Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity, Temperature, Pressure, SpO2, GSR, PM 2.5, and more. Location Trackers, Fitness Trackers, SoS Devices, Sports Wearable, and Smart Watches are currently trending in India as well as abroad. Technology is advancing in terms of communication, payments and location tracking through NFC, Wi-Fi, GPS & BLE 5. It is making easier to implement tracking, payments and access control in the wearable devices.
Expertise: Glide Technology & GOQii
Glide Technology provides product engineering services including hardware design, firmware & software development and testing services for Wearable & IoT Products. Patel shared that the company focus is always on designing latest technology products for our clients. They come up with new ideas and we help them to convert that idea into product. We help them in Feasibility of Product, Product Architecture, Hardware Design, Software Solution, Prototype Development, Testing and Maintenance of the product. We also work with our global ecosystem partners for aesthetic design and manufacturing of wearable products. We have worked on diverse wearable projects such as SoS Watch, Hybrid Smart Watch, Location Tracking and Access Control Device, Smart Jewellery Product, Wearable Ring and many more.
GOQii is a smart-tech-enabled preventive healthcare platform that brings together the entire preventive healthcare ecosystem. The company is a pioneer in wearable based smart-tech-enabled fitness and healthcare. It’s Smart Health Ecosystem integrates tools for real-time personalized coaching both remote as well as through GOQii Play- an in-app live video coaching platform, an explosive high-growth Health e-commerce store, scheduling health check-ups, a health locker and insurance discounts based on health management data. Given the state of ‘Sickcare’ delivery infrastructure in India, the company strongly believes that preventive healthcare is the only viable, long-term, mass-market solution. As one of the official partners of the ‘Fit India Movement’ GOQii is a strong supporter of Narendra Modi’s vision of making 1.3 crore Indians fit and healthy.
According to a study done by Statista, the number of connected wearable devices worldwide will rise to 1.1 billion in 2022, a significant increase from the 526 million reported in 2016.
So, the future of wearables is bright. As technology advances and wearable capabilities expand, the companies will go according to flow. The time will come soon when we see the drastic changes in wearables technology and its special features will amaze us.
Wearables will allow for better personal monitoring, whether for health purposes or just learning your routine. This means better scheduling and health knowledge, and unfortunately, if we’re not careful, it means better ads being delivered to us on digital platforms. Wearables are the final step to fully integrate digital infrastructure with a very analog life that we’ve kept for thousands of years.
