The world has gone wearable tech crazy over the past couple of years, but Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman believes the future of health tracking will place gadgets inside the body.
The burgeoning wearable tech market is expected to
triple in value over the next 10 years, according to a research forecast by IDTechEx, although initial uptake has not been as fast as some analysts expected.
The
arrival of the Apple Watch was anticipated to send wearable tech sales into overdrive, however one of the barriers to wider acceptance of the technology has been the fact that people often forget to carry their devices.
"The first thing you have to crack though is actually getting people to wear it," said Rahman – whose wrist-worn Jawbone health tracker was one of the frontrunners of the first wearable tech wave.
"If you can keep it on all the time, the amount of information you get about the user is staggering."
But the amount of information that can be collected by a wearable pales into comparison with the amount that could be tracked by a device inside the body, added Rahman, who envisions a future whereby trackers are ingested. Some devices will "pass through you," he said at the Code/Mobile conference last week, while others could stay in your bloodstream and monitor things like circulation, levels of nutrition and the functioning of individual organs.
The implications for health and wellness are endless, with in-body devices able to provide a far more accurate picture of any number of ailments and conditions. This would help wellness professionals to provide far more tailored programmes for their clients in the gym or spa, for example.
Spa Opportunities' sister publication,
Spa Business Handbook, identified 'invisible wearables' as
an up-and-coming trend in its 2015 edition, noting wearables would become more natural and less obtrusive.
Several companies are currently working on ingestible technology, although consumer devices are still thought to be many years away. Google has announced that it’s working on a pill capable of detecting diseases at cellular level, while several other firms are understood to be exploring the possibilities that ingestibles could deliver.
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