Wearable technology isn’t an entirely new concept.  The most recognizable form is the wristwatch, which has been around for centuries.  The common wristwatch didn’t evolve much for most of that time.  Beginning as a mechanical device, the addition of a battery and electrical components began a rapid era of change.  Soon watches began to do more than just tell time.  They included a calculator or even a TV screen in the 1970s.

The wristwatch, however, started to seem a little less appealing when smartphones became more popular.  Now you could have a phone that also told you the time and did so much more and you could comfortably carry it in a pocket.  I stopped wearing watches shortly after I got my first smartphone.  Fitness devices would soon appear on a somewhat niche scale offering heart rate monitoring and GPS logging of activities.  The market exploded around 2013 when devices like the Fitbit became popular.  These devices could track your heart rate, map your activities, estimate the calories you burned, measure how well you slept, and many other data points and they did it in an easily wearable form factor at a comfortable price.

Smartwatches soon followed that combined the capabilities of fitness trackers with messaging, calling, music players, gaming, and other features.  I admittedly delayed my entry into the category of smartwatch owner until a couple years ago when I received a Garmin smartwatch as a gift.  Since that time, I’ve put it to good use and found a number of features useful.

I’m currently in the confirmation stage with smartwatches.  Given that I didn’t adopt the technology until years after it had been introduced and was somewhat common, I was a late majority adopter.  This was a change from my adoption of other technology, such as smartphones.  I distinctly remember my first purchase:  the newly released Motorola Droid featuring the Android 2.0 operating system.  This was early in the emergence of the smartphones that we commonly use today and I was part of the early majority with that technology.

References:

Baguley, R. (2013, September 20). The gadget we miss: The calculator watch. Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/the-gadget-we-miss-the-calculator-watch-1344076812.

Kaewkannate, K., &  Kim, S. (2016, May 24). A comparison of wearable fitness devices. BMC public health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4877805/.