Wearable technology
Wearable technology is a category of technology devices that can be worn by people as it will track information related to health, fitness and other activities. For many years, wearable technology was mostly in the development phase but in past few years, it has reached an infection point and exploded with many companies offered these devices. From the Fitbit, Nike’s fuel-band to Shine, Samsung’s watches and Microsoft band, the market was full of wearable technology devices. From fitness trackers that monitor your heart rate, your calories consumption, your blood pressure, to devices that monitor your baby in bed, and keep track over your children at playground, wearable technology is evolving fast and begins to impact many things.
Currently, it seems that every technology company is working on wearable technology. An analyst predicts that in the next two years, there will be more wearable technology devices available just like the smartphones and tablets today. Google is improving its Google’s glass, a concept that receives a lot of videos on YouTube and thousands of comments among technology enthusiasts. Apple is working on the iWatch with huge customers’ expectations about what it will do. Microsoft has announced its Band, wearable devices that can do more than just tracking your health activities. Regardless of the product, investors have pumped billion dollars to companies that are developing wearable technology products and consumers cannot wait for more exciting wearable devices as they are willing to spend more on this new technology.
If smart phones, smart watches, and smart glasses are popular why not smart clothes? There are several companies that are designing smart fabrics to creating smart clothes where you can wear and they will record your heart rate, the steps you take and the calories intakes throughout the day. Few months ago, Facebook pay $2 billion to acquire Oculus a “virtual reality” headset company for videogame players where players wear the headset to participate in virtual world where instead of watching and playing games, they becoming part of the games in the virtual world etc. Of course wearable technology is fascinating and exciting, but several analysts already warned that it will change many things that we do not even imagine. Today smartphones have already changed many people behaviors in ways that people do not even think that it could happen. You can watch young people who use smartphone today, they are fully occupied and not pay attention at anything else beside the small screen even when they walk or work. A psychologist warned: “The closer technologies get to us, the more they impact us and change the way we act”. Of course, teachers are concerned about the issue of students send text message in class and parents worry about their children play video games instead of study using their own smartphones but the fact is wearable devices will modify users’ behavior much more as they become a part of what you wear.
As the trend of wearable technology is exploding all over the world, the demand of workers with these skills is also increasing fast. Students often ask me what platforms should they focusing on. What tools and techniques should they be learning? Where should they focus their efforts? Of course, this technology is still evolving but currently the key platforms are Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and Microsoft’s Windows. If you are familiar with these platforms, you will do well with the wearable technology too. If you have good knowledge of software development on mobile then you can quickly make the jump to the wearable technology devices. If you can create applications that work well across multiple platforms, then you will do very well and your skills will be in high demand. Programming languages for wearable devices are not much different from mobile devices development. Common languages include Java, C#, C++, Objective C, HTML5, XML, Python and Ruby. Wearable devices depend greatly on the connectivity of the device to Internet and cloud-based services so knowledge of how they work is also important.
Today, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and hundred smaller companies are all working on wearable technology so people predict that there will be a big fight among these companies for larger market share. Who know in a few more years, everything we wear may have technology built in them. As more companies are moving quickly into this new area, the demand for technology workers also increases fast. If you do not study technology now, you may miss a very good opportunity to develop a solid career in this fast changing world.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
