Hi-tech goes High Street

The launch of Apple's new smart watch - Apple Watch - will open the door to an avalanche of wearable technology devices that will enter the marketplace to underpin the emerging BYOX (bring your own everything) technology trend.

While Apple's latest release is not the first consumer electronics device of this genre - Samsung, Motorola and Pebble were earlier market explorers - it is expected to represent the vanguard of the BYOX movement, acting as a catalyst for further wearable device innovation in the near term.

Apple Watch is launched with around two dozen applications, including an airlines 'app' that displays a digital boarding pass, an app to help users keep up with sports scores, and a Pinterest app that gives directions to pinned locations. There is also an app to let owners see the charge level of their electric vehicles and offer directions to their parked cars.

The adoption of 'consumer tech' in business is trending towards wearable devices, which will evolve to include other smart watch-type devices as well as smart eyewear such as Google Glass.

For consumers, the integration of wearable devices into jewellery and clothing lines - together with a range of groundbreaking apps - can be expected to reach high street stores within 12 months.

Target market segments will initially include mobile executives, techno-geeks, 'fashionistas' and the fitness-conscious, giving vendors significant scope for app development and opportunities to expand on the more common heart-rate, calorie-consumption, GPS location and other monitoring concepts with which consumers are becoming familiar.

More serious applications, targeted at the elderly, will encompass blood pressure and other vital signs monitoring, which will have life-saving rather than lifestyle appeal.

Looking to the future, the functions of wearable devices will be increasingly varied. In the work environment, these may include the recognition of gestures, signals or particular motions to remotely control machinery, facilitate the assembly of components, direct activities in hazardous environments or where accessibility is limited.

As wearable devices become commoditised, economies of scale will allow them to be more accessible to less affluent purchasers. Wearables will have significant roles in third-world countries, where some of the biggest advances in the healthcare arena - including disease control - will be inspired by their technology.

Researchers estimate the market for wearables will rise to $170 billion by 2020, with around 25% of all adults in the US with access to the Internet purchasing a wearable device of one sort or another within a year.

Marketplace expansion will, of necessity, improve wireless connectivity within and outside corporate environments, where it will become ubiquitous. It will also drive developments associated with battery technology with positive implications for size, capacity and longevity targets.

As the BYOX trend gains momentum, it will spawn myriad uses for new wearable technology in the enterprise. Information gathering from these devices will be as vital to the wellbeing of a business as it will be to providing the tools necessary to help keep employees fit.

In this light, companies will be required to re-evaluate and even expand existing device policies to encompass company-specific objectives for wearable computing technology, and figure out how to collect, store, access and analyse the resulting data.

More serious applications, targeted at the elderly, will encompass blood pressure and other vital signs monitoring.

Here, big data (the trend towards the analysis of large data sets) and the Internet of Things (the interconnection of devices within the existing Internet infrastructure) will provide 'number crunching' abilities to boost the relevance, importance and speed of the data 'pushed' to wearable technology users.

While the BYOD movement brought many more portable devices - laptops, tablets and smartphones - into the office, the acceptance of BYOX programmes has the potential to bring many more into play. Not only will these devices be capable of interfacing with existing BYODs, but because of their 'always-on' characteristics, and the constant interaction they promote with users, they will be able to generate far more data covering and a wider range of inputs.

As attractive as these attributes may be, they are already sparking security concerns. With wearables quickly outnumbering PCs, tablets and even smartphones in the marketplace, they will become easier targets for malware and hackers. They could also become potential platforms from which cyber attacks are launched.

It will fall to the company CIO to consider the ramifications of the emerging BYOX culture and make decisions as to what wearables are relevant from both productivity and employee satisfaction perspectives, always with an eye on the possible security threats they may introduce.

Wearable devices may well be seen by history as the equivalent of the 'ball-point pen', becoming an ever-present tool, without which future productivity and efficiency targets could never be met.