Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

Ring This Up: Smart Wearables Hitting Mainstream Status

Consumer adoption of smart wearables is now nearly half (48%) of U.S. Internet households, Kristen Hanich, director of research for Parks Associates, told a Connected Health Summit audience Thursday, signaling that the category is “crossing the chasm” -- or moving from early adopters to the mainstream.

Five years ago, “adoption was half of what it is today,” she noted, adding that as the category has evolved, consumers are increasingly turning to service subscriptions on top of the cost of the wearables themselves.

One third of wearable owners now have such subscriptions, Hanich said. These are led by cellular plans, but “fitness and lifestyle subscriptions, premium health insights, and health coaching services are in demand and growing,” she explained.

The wearables market is led by smart watches, “owned and used by roughly a third of U.S. internet households,” Hanich reported, followed by smart scales, and then connected exercise equipment.

Moving up, though, are smart rings and hybrid watches (which look like dumb analog watches despite being smart). Indeed, she said that 12% of households are likely to purchase a smart ring in the next six months, a figure just about equal to those looking to purchase both hybrid watches and GPS sports watches. Smart watches and fitness trackers still lead in consumer want lists, however.

Hanich pointed out that smart rings and hybrid watches have the advantage of being screenless devices.

From the article, "Ring This Up: Smart Wearables Hitting Mainstream Status" by Les Luchter

Previously In The News

The Market For Hearable Devices 2016-2020 – And Then There Were Airpods…

The hearables market goes back to the first Bluetooth headsets which were launched in 2001, followed by wireless stereo headphones, which arrived a few years later. Neither made great waves in the mar...

Apple Music Announces First Original TV Series

A recent study from Parks Associates found that 31% of broadband-enabled households have more than one over-the-top (OTT) subscription and 63% have at least one, with Netflix and Amazon Video being th...

Consumers’ Adoption Of Voice Assistants Doubled In Q1 – Here’s Why

The use of artificial intelligence-based voice assistants is growing rapidly, thanks the consumer interest in “smart home” devices offered by Amazon, Google, Samsung, Apple, and others. That in tur...

Antennas Get A Good Reception Again

In fact, since 2013, the percentage of broadband households in the nation using only antennas to watch linear TV has jumped from 9 percent to 15 percent, according to data released this month by Parks...