Wearable AI: What Does the Implementation Mean for the Digital World

Peeyush Singh June 1, 2023

Wearables have been a part of our life and an important digital transformation for many years now. In the 1980s, when the first digital hearing aids were first released, we couldn’t have imagined it to become an inherent part of our lives today. In the present day scenario as well, AI in the fitness industry is enabling smarter workouts without gyming equipment with the incorporation of AI wearables that help personalize your fitness goals.

Back in 2004, dubbed as the year of wearable technology when there was a sudden rise in activity trackers once the Apple Watch was introduced, the innovations that have been happening in the wearable sector are no less than complete transformations.

But sometime between today, when you are reading this article, and a few years ago, there was a time when wearable devices started losing their charm – mostly because of the fact that people got bored with tracking their counts or getting phone call notifications on their smartwatch. This was when the talks of making wearables smarter started doing rounds.

In fact, the fitness industry is witnessing a tremendous shift due to the widespread adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) product offerings.

AI-Based Wearable Market Overview

The rise in the adoption of AI assistants, integration of wireless technology and development of IoT has driven the market growth of wearable AI. For instance, smartwatches have already earned their place in the wearable AI market years back, and the computing power of AI to a tiny watch has truly unlocked a world full of possibilities. Apart from this, there has been rapid utilization of natural language interfaces that have made wearables even more powerful; in the future, they might hold the potential to replace PCs and smartphones.

If you check out the sales of wearable devices, then it is estimated that the smart wearables market will reach a valuation of $31.95 billion by the year 2026, growing at a CAGR of 11.5%. When compared to all the global regions, North America has 25% of the adult population using wearable devices, followed by the Asia Pacific region.

With that proven, let’s see how wearable can be utilized in various industries.

How is Wearable AI Technology Utilized in Different Industries?

Modern wearable technology falls under a broad spectrum of usability, including fitness trackers like smartwatches, VR headsets, AI smart wearable glasses, smart jewellery, and Bluetooth headsets. Each AI wearable device works differently based on the category they belong to, such as fitness, health, or entertainment.

Most of us think that wearable technology is only limited to healthcare and fitness, but has already been incorporated into different types of scenarios. The following are the most popular next in wearable technology applications in various industries.

Healthcare

Digital transformation has already reshaped the healthcare sector and has led to better and more accurate functionalities with AI analytics in wearable offering stats on patient’s health, real-time insights, inference, diagnosis, and reports.

Medical applications and devices are now connected to the healthcare IT system, which is AI-led and is known as the Internet of Things. With AI and wearable technology in healthcare, it is now possible for patients to take precautionary healthcare measures at home by keeping track of their health details.

IoT artificial intelligence wearable intricately connects all the data with real-time health monitoring sensors that furnish timely reports and displays different health parameters that help the patients to make quick decisions and take necessary measures to keep themselves fit.

Bonus Read- How AI and IoT Can Be Beneficial for Your Business?

Gaming

Mobile gaming is a popular industry that will remain in vogue for the next few decades. This could be mainly because it has introduced artificial intelligence wearables in its industry. From making AI-enabled real-time audio and visual trackers to AR and VR-enabled games, the industry is moving towards a hedonist user experience. With AI-enhancing wearables, gaming devices have garnered more user engagement.

With the release of various VR devices, more and more people have started showing interest in AI-backed gaming. Therefore, wearable devices and gaming are often in a symbiotic linear rate with a common goal of giving the target audience an interrupted AI-driven experience.

Fitness and Sports

The fitness and sports industries have recently entered into the tech cosmos. The AI-enabled Bluetooth devices coming in the form of fitness trackers are now featured with biosensors. These biosensors detect elevation, heart rate, proximity, motion, and touch.

The application of AI in the sports and fitness industry can also be seen with the introduction of smart headphones that have an AI-based personal trainer which guides the workout process by providing real-time tracking details of cycling, running, and other exercises. Therefore, body-mounted AI wearable devices can successfully provide complete fitness information to their users, simply with voice assistants and real-time insights.

Retail

Artificial intelligence wearable monitoring devices have also found their evolution in the retail industry. Consumer retail, especially the clothing sector, is now designing back with the advanced performance of wearable technology. Mobile apps are now synced with AI-driven wearable apparel like hand gloves, jackets, etc., specifically made to ensure the user’s or wearer’s safety.

Also known as smart clothing, this breakthrough in the fashion world has gained wide popularity these days. For instance, Levi’s has made a jacket that has the Google Project Jacquard Technology. This jacket has threads that are composed of electrical fibers enabling the user or the wearer to play music and calls or click photos right from their sleeves.

Wearable Industry Shortcomings That Artificial Intelligence Solves

The problem in wearable technology that would need an AI technology solution is two-fold.

On one side, there is a problem that users face in terms of the lack of an action item. Imagine this, suppose your smartwatch notifies you that you have walked 300 steps in a day. Now, what would you like to do with the information? Don’t you want to know what the ideal step counts are? Or do you need a comparison with the previous day’s step count? Or simply need information about how many more steps would you need to meet your goal?

Now on the other side, there is a ‘what is the next step problem’ with the wearable service providers. When built simply on the idea of fetching information from the body and notifying the vitals of the users, there comes a time when users start asking about the value proposition (although the instance almost never comes in the case of medical wearable apps which are devised to track vitals). What is difficult for service providers is to think about the expansion model – another one of the wearables challenges that fitness AI solves.

For instance, AI technologies like an artificial intelligence smartwatch is creating a benchmark in enabling real-time monitoring of one’s fitness and health goals.

Let us look into some trends throwing light on the rise of fitness AI and wearables convergence.

AI and Wearables Technology Trends To Keep Yourself Updated With

Many key market players are today targeting Gen Z and introducing AI-backed wearable devices. Different cutting-edge wearable devices are now coming up with minimally intrusive health monitoring features that have recently developed with a few more advancements. Let’s check out some of the top technology trends of wearable devices with AI capabilities that have influenced the growth of wearable devices.

Continuous improvements in the design, function, and variety of available wearable devices, in addition to constant innovations introduced by a skilled wearable app development company.
Emergence of edge computing on powerful processors like the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Wear 3100 Platform.
Enhanced AI algorithms and advancements in wireless connectivity such as 5G, are increasing the functionality for providing a seamless user experience.
Many wearable device manufacturers are focusing on incorporating personal health and wellness features in the devices like heart rate monitors, blood oxygen sensors, electrocardiogram monitors, and other types of sensors that can actually alert potential health hazards.
Another major trend in wearable devices is e-payment. For example, a British menswear designer, Lyle & Scott, has recently launched a payment jacket that allows contactless payments. This contactless payment jacket comes with a chip-in-cuff that operates the procedure.
Smart wearable device market will be able to sustain double-digit growth, with 780 million units poised to sell by the end of the year 2022.

Use Cases of Wearable AI Technology

The use cases of artificial intelligence in wearable technology are presently divided into three main categories: Healthcare & Safety, Enhancing AR/VR, and Intelligent Assistants.

Enhancing Augmented and Virtual Reality

The role of VR and wearable in the healthcare domain is already extremely prevalent in the market. The need, however, is to make them intelligent.

The first and most uprising use cases of wearable AI are seen in their incorporation in the AR/VR segment. The mixed reality devices which use a blend of augmented and virtual reality can be enhanced greatly through AI technologies incorporation in the wearable industry. The present mixed reality headsets have to be connected to either a powerful PC or smartphone to work. But their performance, however, is dependent on the processor’s power.

AI can lower the wearable workload by adjusting the performance of the headset to what the users require at the moment. Through interaction with the user and their environment, the intelligent machines are able to understand their preferences and the information that has to be displayed and lower the latency, which is experienced with mixed reality.

Example: Microsoft has launched HoloLens 2, a dedicated AI core processor for providing users with an expansive experience. Intelligent Wearable Assistant

With applications in wearable technology being on the rise, artificial intelligence devices are becoming true assistants and thus improving the customer experience. The use case of AI Analytics in wearable is fairly evident in the sports world where gadgets and advanced sensors are embedded in smart apparel and provide users with real-time notification of their metrics in addition to actionable advice for improving performance and insights for lowering the injuries risk. A justifiable example of this is an artificial intelligence smartwatch.

Other than the sports industry, it is also seen in the case of event and travel use cases, where the users are notified of their flight timings or movie schedule.

Example: When we talk about the companies using wearable technology and fitness AI combination, both Google and Apple offer the functionality of syncing their assistant services: Google Assistant and Siri, with their Watch, EarPods, and other wearables.

Also, our experts at Appinventiv worked with Innovative Eyewear, who launched a social media application Vyrb, that enables users to send and receive audio messages through Bluetooth wearable devices. The application was incorporated with audio command features like Siri and Google voice assistant. To make this feature even more engaging, our development team incorporated a unique autoplay functionality and a voice-focused inbox feature.

Health & Safety

The use cases of AI and wearable technology in healthcare are most sought after. On an individual level, both the technologies – AI in Healthcare and Wearable in Healthcare – are doing a lot of efforts to make the sector disruptive. There are multiple ways in which the combination of artificial intelligence and wearable tech is helping the healthcare industry become a lot more responsive and preventative.

The technology, through natural language processing and computer vision, learns the visual cues sighted people recognize in cities, like paths, buildings, sidewalks, curbs, etc. It then uses the information by converting it into natural voice cues that help visually impaired wearers move around the city comfortably. One such example of natural language processing is an app called Soniphi. It is a frequency-based personal wellness app that allows users to record their voice notes and get a full health analysis report.
Machine Learning in healthcare can help users to understand all seizure patterns through real-time monitoring. These wearable devices with AI capabilities can be worn by someone having epilepsy and can then alert them if a pattern is recognized so that they get time to pull off the road or reach a safe spot in time.
With the help of machine learning, meaningful data can be created by monitoring the physiological markers of stressors and emotional arousal in children with an autism spectrum disorder. This, in turn, can help caregivers identify potential precursors, thus making the health and care domain a lot more preventive through the introduction of wearables and AI in healthcare.

A similar type of alert-based healthcare app known as YouCOMM is an in-hospital patient communication app that helps patients to get instant help from medical caregivers while being at the hospital. This particular app allows the patients to notify the medical staff about their needs through manual selection of features, voice commands, and even head gestures.

Bonus Read- 8 Tips For Wearable App Development (Part1) – Appinventiv

Challenges Associated With the Incorporation of AI in Wearable Technology

The advent of AI might have solved several problems and streamlined operations, but it also has a few challenges associated with it. Let’s check them out:

Wearable AI development challanges

Battery Life

During the development and evaluation of wearable fitness devices, one of the key challenge areas for us in the entire AI project management cycle was managing the battery life. Since the computational power of AI wearables is a lot less compared to smartphones, the batteries tend to run out much sooner than ideal. Two approaches that we followed to counter this in our wearable technology development process were:

We processed only the data that we needed through edge computing and
We optimized our code in a way that would support minimal usage.

Privacy

A successful implementation of Artificial Intelligence Wearables calls for a lot of data. In this scenario, it is very important to keep privacy as the top priority. All throughout the development process, we had to keep ourselves asking if we needed to collect certain information. The next important thing was to compute the derived data on the fly. All these measures tend to increase the wearable app development services cost to a great extent, something that can be worrisome for startup entrepreneurs.

Security

There are some security–sensitive AIs like the ones that make use of wearable cameras for facial recognition. For such devices, it has been our priority to make use of on-device data processing in our wearable app development processes. The usage of edge computing saves the need to transmit data through public or private cloud services. This avoidance offers a high level of privacy. But in instances where transmission of the data is necessary, we follow ways to encrypt the data to its entirety.

Kickstart your Wearable App Development Journey Today

In short, wearable devices that are powered by artificial intelligence technology are helping businesses tap new arenas of digitalization along with improving lives as well as their ROI. Industries across the globe and domains have already started diving deeper into innovation with AI.

If you have a great idea in mind, start looking for an experienced wearable app development company to help you estimate the costs associated.

FAQs

Q. How is IoT used in wearables?

A. IoT-enabled medical wearable devices offer individuals the information required for achieving better health outcomes. Artificial intelligence wearables in healthcare improve the overall visibility of an individual user’s health status. Wearables connect people to IoT through direct contact with the user’s body on a fitness tracker, smartwatch, smart jewelry, or VR headsets.

Q. How long does it take to build a wearable app?

A. The time taken to build a wearable app depends on the e structure of the project and the complexity of the app. It takes three to nine months to build a wearable app. Each stage of the wearable AI app development process needs a different amount of time to complete.

Q. What is wearable smart technology?

A. Wearable smart technology is implemented on wearable devices that can detect and analyze the user’s heartbeat, and speech patterns, monitor moods and warns about various health signals. Modern wearable technology sees multiple usabilities in fitness trackers like smartwatches, VR headsets, Bluetooth headsets, and web-enabled glasses.

Q. How have AI wearable devices revolutionized the healthcare industry?

A. Here are some of the ways in which artificial intelligence in wearable devices has transformed the healthcare industry:

Remote monitoring of patients
Monitoring chronic conditions
Early diagnosis
Enhancing healthcare and lifestyle patterns
Seamless handling of emergency situations

Q. What is the future of wearable technology?

A. Wearable technology sees a bright future. Wearables will not just be limited to smartwatches but various other domains will explore wearable AI technology. Here’s what we can expect from wearable technology in the future:

Energy harvesting: Wearable technology ensures a longer battery life. Wearing a smartwatch that constantly needs to be charged is quite frustrating. The future of such devices will incorporate energy or feature that would convert body movement heat or solar energy into raw power.
Authentication and identification: Most of the apps require two-factor identification. However, in the future, the machine learning wearable will have fever capabilities of authentication. With a simple biometric and other simpler features, a user can access such apps. A few innovators are also looking to what at the smart tattoo technology that transfers identification information when scanned.