A Survey of the Historical Scope and Current Trends of Wearable Technology Applications

The field of wearable technology has undergone significant growth in the last few years. Along with this growth come trends in consumer application development, which may be indicative of structural influences on the design and development of products as well as social influences among consumers. Here, we present a two-phase survey of the application space of wearable technology, by assessing applications observed in research or industrial activities from two time periods: initially with a historical focus (mapping the space up to 2014) and subsequently through a 1-year snapshot by mapping developments between 2014 and 2015. We evaluate distribution in application instances over the body surface, over a range of product types, and within a set of application categories, as well as differences in product price and gender target. The implications of changes in product focus areas over these two time frames are discussed.