What's Next For Wearable Sensing?

The commercial explosion of wearable sensing devices in the early 2010s forever changed the landscape of wearable computing. In a few short years, wrist-mounted devices such as wristbands and smart watches dominated the market.1 In 2017, this department featured an article titled “What will we wear after smartphones?” highlighting potential pathways for wearable computing as the early enthusiasm for commercial wearable sensors began to wane, and new form factors like on-skin devices gained traction in the research community.2 In the past few years, we have witnessed substantial changes in many of the domains discussed in that article. Sensor validation and comparison with other state of the art or reference systems has become of paramount importance in a saturated wearables market. Similarly, FDA approval or CE marking of smartphone or sensor-based medical applications is now a priority of many of the players targeting healthcare applications. For traditional form factors such as wristbands and other accessories, large improvements have also been made in hardware, thanks to further miniaturization and improved design (see Figure 1). Figure 1. Phone cameras, watches, and rings have become widespread sensing modalities for accurate monitoring of biometric data. Figure 2. Graphs show mean deviation from baseline (lines) with 95% CIs (shaded areas) for daily resting heart rate (RHR), sleep quantity, and step count during −7 to 133 days after symptom onset for COVID-19–positive versus COVID-19–negative participants (panels (a), (c), and (e)) and for COVID-19–positive participants grouped by mean change in RHR during days 28 to 56 after symptom onset (panels (b), (d), and (f)). Acquired with permission from Radin et al.8