It's hard to keep up with the wearables market, especially when every other article on the subject has a headline that contradicts the one before it. Here are some examples from recent news articles that sensationalize, dramatize, celebrate, and forebode the future of wearables.
Is your wearable tech helping you -- or watching you?
Smart devices, wearables pose security risks for consumers
Are they threatening to our security, or could they save our lives? Or both?
Wearable tech: It could save your life
JWT Singapore's New Line of Wearables Will Keep You Safe
Image From CNN
Exclusive: Nike fires majority of FuelBand team, will stop making wearable hardware
Nike’s pull away from wearable tech might be good for field
Why an Apple/Nike Partnership Would Sell Wearables
If anything, this erratic approach to news keeps us active in finding those articles that actually add substance to the discussion, rather than playing on our anxieties and weakness to click on any provocative link.
Better yet, we can add to those substantive headlines by making informed, productive contributions of our own.
Challenge of Making Wearable Technologies Meet Real Needs in Our Lives
There's also a lot out there about wearables as data gathering tools for brands, and ways to have round the clock immediate access to users. But the day wearables are ubiquitous will be the day the user becomes the main benefactor, not the supplier. Brands will never maintain an audience through wearables until users see and experience real value in their wearables. This means answering real needs, which seems, so far, within all these spasmodic headlines, to be the one element that still eludes both engineers and designers.