First off, I found it really interesting that not many people were wearing wearables at a wearables conference… hmm.

I attended the Glazed Conference  up in San Francisco yesterday to get a peek at the latest and greatest thinking in the wearables space:

 • Beyond FitBit, which has eaten up half the market, there is a lot of fragmentation

 • Unlike smartphones, wearables seem to have a limited lifespan – most users stop wearing their wearables about 90 days in, especially when it comes to fitness wearables – this tells me that there is plenty of interesting work that could be done to improve behavior modification which can result from the collected data. There is a lot we can do to make the wearable sticky.

 • It’s still early days – there is no standardization and a lot of devices overlap themselves with sensors (for example the Lumo Lift, while its main purpose is improving posture, it can also step track, like a FitBit. This cries out for a wearable ecosystem, almost like a personal area network, maybe using your smartphone as a hub, to gather and share information among your wearables. For example, your Basis watch could track your heart rate, and pass that information into a shared service on your phone, and your FitBit tracker can read your heart rate from that database.

 • For the fitness trackers, there is too much detailed access to data in order to truly change behavior in order to improve your health. There is a market opportunity here to develop apps and services that sit above the devices and provide a more motivational environment for behavior change.

 • Wearables must bring immediate value out of the box with no to very little setup required

 • Wearables must be as easy to use as a band-aid

 • Maybe multipurpose wearables will help make them as essential as the smartphone…

and most importantly:

 • Wearables must look good – no one really wants to look like a dork (well some people don’t care, but many do) so fashion is very important!

All in all, really interesting stuff – and we’ll be using a lot of these findings in our future wearable products. We build wearable devices based on your ideas, so if you have any let us know.