Growth of the wearable technology market is moving at Mach speeds. Its global market is anticipated to increase from US$157.94 billion in 2024 to US$1,415.26 billion by 2032. Device shipments are projected to reach 559.7 million units in 2024 and increase to 645.7 million units by the end of 2028. This significant adoption and growth trajectory highlights the increasing consumer demand and technological advancements in this sector.
It’s fair to say that most people associate wearables with wearable tech. The Apple Watch is arguably the most successful wearable tech product, offering valuable functions, instant connection with others, convenience of access to the world for consumers—and remarkable profit. The Apple Watch signals status and reinforces brand trust because, well, it just works.
Now with moves into health care, Apple Watch is upping the ante with physiological monitoring. While mechanical watches have been traditional ubiquitous wearables, Apple Watch is now the seemingly de facto wearable. For it to achieve widespread adoption and explosive growth at such a rapid pace—all packaged in such a small, visually unobtrusive and intimate way—is truly astonishing. Apple has managed to evolve their customer’s connection with others from a phone, which is sometimes hidden in a pocket, to wrist, which is public and obvious.
Wearable tech started with the collection of data to support the “quantified self” movement (for example, tracked steps per day). This evolved into devices that processed that data to provide “behavioural nudging” like gamification to reach specific health goals.
Wearables are continuing to evolve by delivering therapy like electrical stimulation and mechanical augmentation of muscles. They have grown important to the insurance industry, playing a factor in premiums, due to their ability to confirm wearer compliance, behavior and activity. Now, augmented, mixed and virtual reality headsets expand the opportunities of wearable tech in a new form factor, ripe with new challenges and benefits. The most recent emerging opportunity is to provide a worn, touchless platform for AI assistants.
Priority Designs‘ collaborative approach to developing wearables over the past 20 years has provided valuable insights. (Credit: Priority Designs)
The complexity of wearable design
In addition to delivering valuable function, wearables must feel right.
This is a careful compromise of competing constraints: comfort, proper fit, skin compatibility and breathability, ease to don/doff/adjust, intuitive use, branded visual appeal, manufacturing materials and processes, and cost targets. This requires a mix of considerations that includes the needs of the wearer, the goals of the company, and the capabilities of the manufacturer.
Some wearables integrate diverse functionalities, including physical interaction (buttons, haptics, lights, sound) and digital interaction (touchscreen displays, GUIs, natural language processing, etc.). On the physical interaction side, this includes further integrating hard goods components like rigid plastic and metal housings, PC boards and sensors, with soft goods components like textiles and soft molded parts.
In addition, a significant challenge is to integrate these diverse functionalities in the smallest form factor to ensure that the wearer’s full range of motion is accommodated and to minimize weight. Successful management and seamless integration of these diverse functionalities in a wearable offers the greatest promise of commercial success. It also explains why some wearables fail, as the bar for integration is fairly high.
Just as there is complexity in choreographing multiple wearable product components, there is also complexity in the wearable product development process itself. Each component requires a specific skillset to optimize its function, and those discrete areas of expertise need to rally around a clearly defined top-level goal. This orchestration is best handled in a collaborative setting, where experts from different disciplines can build off each other’s ideas, catch errors, fill gaps and speed the overall development timeline efficiently.
There is complexity in the wearable product development process. Each component requires a specific skillset to optimize its function, and this orchestration is best handled in a collaborative setting, where experts from different disciplines can build off each other’s ideas and speed the overall development timeline efficiently. (Credit: Priority Designs)
The collaborative design paradigm
A prime example of the need to properly integrate various disciplines in the product development process is the implementation of removable components. To clean reusable wearable tech products, batteries must be removed prior to machine washing, so a robust and dependable connection strategy is needed. This connection can take the form of a cradle that holds a battery module in place, includes non-ferrous connection points fused to conductive pathways, and might include buttons or lights, all while being securely fastened to a textile substrate.
That’s a lot to manage in a small area.
Success requires expertise across multiple areas: mechanical engineering expertise for the design and testing of rigid housings and interfaces; electrical engineering to specify electronic components, determine power consumption and design the PC boards; soft goods specialists to specify textiles, formulate construction methods and determine a sizing strategy; industrial design to define a holistic, aesthetic solution, optimize the user experience and integrate ergonomic considerations; and prototyping to fabricate working models for evaluation.
Design, soft goods, UX/UI, prototyping, engineering, research and testing capabilities comprise the expertise needed to bring a good idea to life as a great wearable product. The most time and cost-efficient way to integrate these various disciplines is to organize them under one roof and provide all the tools necessary for the teams to do their best work.
Embracing interdisciplinary collaboration
To succeed, wearables must meet technical requirements and satisfy user preferences, being intuitive, enjoyable and meeting real needs. This principle is illustrated by real-world examples, showcasing the power of collaborative synergy and how the diversity of disciplines broadens the opportunity for innovative design solutions.
For example, while working on a life-saving medical wearable, our design and engineering team focused on the devices core functionality. In partnering with the research team, further insights surfaced that would have significant impact on the end product. Through interviews with early end-users in their homes, the research team gathered feedback on a predicate product that users were currently using and that we were asked to improve. Sometimes, spouses were present and voiced their needs. For example, while LED lights confirm proper operation, they can be bothersome in dark settings, especially for significant others sharing a bedroom with the wearer. This feedback prompted the design team to mute the LED intensity, ultimately improving the user experience (and that of their spouse).
For a personal protective equipment project, our engineers used biomimicry to solve the challenge of adding a structural element to an otherwise soft robotic wearable. This clever approach originated from applying learnings of kinematics discussed by occupational therapists who were engaged at the outset of the project to help the collaborative team understand wearer physiology.
Success requires expertise across multiple areas. (Credit: Priority Designs)
Creating a culture of collaboration
Grasping the guiding principles that underpin effective teamwork is crucial for fostering a collaborative culture.
- Tap your resources: Relative to the challenge at hand, what are the factors that you don’t know about? Perhaps someone from another discipline, who views the same challenge from a different perspective, experienced something similar in the past. You can draw from that wisdom and apply it in a fresh way.
- Seek understanding and consensus: You probably don’t always have the best idea. The best solutions come from a competition of ideas, and good ideas built on other good ideas. Give the team an opportunity to discuss and stress test them through scrutiny. Entertain a range of ideas until it’s time to form consensus around the most appropriate one.
- Keep an open mind: Honor the ideas of others.
- Practice empathy: In the same way you think about the unique needs of the person that you’re designing for, give your collaborators equal consideration.
- Draw from the intelligence of the team: It’s beneficial to stress-test ideas by having them pass muster through the filters of many perspectives and viewpoints.
Navigating the collaborative design journey
Engaging clients throughout the design process is vital, and through collaboration, both internally and externally, varied ideas coalesce into a unified design direction. While every project has its own set of unique requirements, a common trajectory runs through each that lends to delivering the most successful outcome.
- Learn: Research is conducted to learn about the needs of the product wearer, including their pain points, preferences, and use context. Insights from these observations are then translated into ideas. While research specialists manage this process, other disciplines participate in observations to gain a direct understanding of the wearer’s perspective.
- Ideate: In this step, representatives from each of the various disciplines brainstorm together to develop many possible concepts. The varied points of view help capture a wide variety of concept ideas. Discussions among team members help identify areas for further exploration.
- Prototype: Wearables are products that need to feel right. Prototypes are fabricated to explore select ideas that people can wear and evaluate function, fit, comfort and ease of use. This step helps narrow the field of possible options into a singular direction. This process integrates the specialties of prototyping, soft goods, industrial design and engineering.
- Refine: The success of the design process is heavily dependent on the amount of refinement of a design direction. This step incorporates feedback from multiple sources to fine-tune the design solution. It may include multiple, iterative rounds of design and prototyping where learnings are built upon other learnings, chipping away at elements that aren’t working, in favor of those that are. Experts from engineering, design, soft goods and prototyping contribute to this step.
- Test: This step entails another round of research where end users are asked to evaluate refined designs. These individuals have an objective viewpoint and can reveal shortcomings in the design that might not have been seen previously. The findings might necessitate another round of refinement.
- Implement: Once testing provides the needed confidence in a particular design direction, the engineering team develops the singular, refined design direction in an embodiment that is suitable for manufacturing. This requires selection of appropriate materials and production processes. This step requires the input of soft goods specialists who specify textiles and create sizing strategies, industrial designers who indicate color, material, and finish specifications, and engineers who create production-ready CAD and PC board layouts. These disciplines communicate often so that everyone is working in the same direction. This stage requires even greater effort if the wearable is considered a medical device, especially if it needs to be developed in a quality system to meet ISO-13485.
Our collaborative approach to developing wearables over the past 20 years has provided valuable insights. In wearable tech products with aggressive timelines, we’ve learned the importance of regular check-ins on discrete areas of progress. It is necessary to develop wearable textile embodiments simultaneously with electronic subassemblies, assuring ongoing communication and seamless integration.
Additionally, we understand the benefits of team members who wear multiple hats, such as our 3D knitting specialist who codes software and builds circuit boards. This broad expertise enables him to understand the nuance of knitting wearables that incorporate conductive yarns. His interdisciplinary expertise facilitates collaboration with electrical engineers and software developers, expediting problem-solving and solution implementation.
Reflecting on the power of collaborative design
Good ideas come from a variety of sources, and good ideas are transformed into successful innovations when they can successfully pass the scrutiny of varied and experienced perspectives from both internal and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders are product development teammates who can leverage years of experience and their learnings from failed and successful endeavors. External stakeholders are the wearers themselves. It’s critical to get their feedback at the outset of the design process to help influence project focus, and to evaluate a design direction midway through the process to verify that intended features are truly beneficial or not. This combined stakeholder collaboration work strengthens the creative process and increases the likelihood that the design will be successful. When these stakeholders work together under one roof, freed from red tape, they’re able to solve problems confidently and quickly.
Jeff Burger is a senior industrial designer with Priority Designs.
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