In 2014, Apple unveiled the Apple Watch and challenged the wearable device market. The Apple Watch and Google Glass are changing our lives with their ability to monitor health, provide information, and more. As technology advances, wearables are expected to play an even more important role in our daily lives.
In September 2014, Apple unveiled its new product, the Apple Watch, with the ambition to “disrupt the Swiss watch market. As the name suggests, the Apple Watch is Apple’s first wearable device in the form of a wristwatch. In addition to telling the time, Apple Watch users can measure their heart rate, blood sugar, and more, and by connecting with their iPhone, they can control most of the iPhone’s functions from their wrist. The characteristics of these wearable devices are expected to provide users with new experiences beyond the limits of smartphones, which have always been machines separate from people.
If there’s one word to describe the Apple Watch, it’s “wearable”. Wearable is generally a shorthand term for wearable computers, which means that any computer that can be worn or put on a person’s body can be called a wearable computer, so it’s not just a computer on a wrist like the Apple Watch, but also a computer on the head, a computer in a shoe, or even a computer in your underwear, as long as it can be worn.
The biggest strength of wearables is that they can continuously collect information about the user based on where they are worn. In the case of the Apple Watch, it’s a wristwatch, so when the Apple Watch checks your pulse and blood pressure, you can easily check your health on your connected iPhone without going to a doctor. Similarly, a wearable device that can be worn on the foot, head, or other parts of the body can provide a variety of functions that are specific to that body part. Thanks to these features, wearables are likely to play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. For example, athletes can use wearables to measure and analyze their workout data in real time, which can help them create personalized workout plans.
Another example of a wearable computer is Google Glass. In 2012, Google released a video titled “One day…,” which follows a day in the life of a person wearing Google Glass.
“The protagonist, wearing Google Glass, checks a message that arrives in the middle of breakfast and responds to it by voice without having to put down his meal and type the message; heading to the subway entrance on his way to work, Google Glass informs him that the subway is stopped and shows him a route he can walk from his current location to his destination. After seeing a cool mural, the user mutters, “I want to take a picture,” and Google Glass immediately switches to photo mode, snaps a picture, and automatically shares it to social media.”
The video made waves when it was released, and the public was excited that Google was finally going to change the way we live our lives. Unfortunately, it was just a concept video that imagined an idealized use for Google Glass. The commercially available Google Glass has yet to live up to the promise of the video, with a battery life of only four hours and a network dependency on Google services.
Like Google Glass, there’s a lot of skepticism about the current crop of commercially available wearables. In short, can wearables really replace everyday items? Google Glass is priced at a whopping $1500, which is a lot of money for the general public, and it’s been argued that it doesn’t add much to the user’s life. First and foremost, most people spend their time on their tech devices doing work-related tasks, and it’s hard to see how Google Glass would make them more productive.
However, the wearables space is still evolving, and Google Glass is the first generation of wearable devices. The aforementioned Apple Watch hasn’t even hit the market yet, and Google Glass is still working on its shortcomings. Just like it was hard to imagine a smartphone a decade ago, the skepticism about wearables is more of a skepticism. While it may seem far-fetched at the moment, the concept video for Google Glass suggests that wearable computers could be as close to us as smartphones, making our lives easier.
In the meantime, the debate about the impact of wearable technology on our lives is only intensifying as the technology evolves. As wearable devices become more commonplace, they could help individuals monitor their health, manage their workouts, and even track their emotional state. This could revolutionize healthcare, for example, by enabling real-time monitoring of a patient’s condition to quickly recognize and respond to emergencies. In addition, the data collected through wearables will play an important role in providing personalized healthcare.
In conclusion, the development of wearable devices has the potential to significantly change the way we live. We’re still in the early stages, but the possibilities are endless. We need to be prepared and adapt to these changes, and the new experiences that wearables will provide will make our lives more convenient and enriching.
