The wearables market for health and wellness is on the cusp of a significant stride forward, thanks to modern wearable technologies that provide the means to collect and manage health and wellness data in a more convenient and automated fashion. Parks Associates data shows growth in several wearables categories, including digital pedometers and GPS watches.

Wearable devices and their apps offer new means for consumers to manage their health and wellness. Wearables have emerged for fitness tracking, medical condition management, wellness monitoring, and personal safety assistance, among other use cases. New form factors like earbuds, headbands, patches, and smart fabrics enable the collection of new forms of data and push the use case horizon even further.

Parks Associates wearable device research shows U.S. consumers are interested in the benefits that wearable devices provide for health use cases:

• 29% of U.S. broadband households own one connected health device, and 12% own multiple connected health devices.
• More than 60% of future smart watch buyers plan to use a smart watch to track fitness.
• 35% of U.S. smart watch owners are willing to share data from their device for a health insurance discount. 

From the article "Wearables spur on health consumerization" by Jennifer Kent.