CTA: 74% of online U.S. adults likely to purchase health and fitness tech in 2016

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Seventy-four percent of online American adults are likely to purchase health and fitness technology in the next 12 months, with one in three (35 percent) planning to buy a smartwatch, according to the latest research from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Entitled “Consumers Journey to Purchase: Health and Fitness,” the study found that consumer purchase intent in the health and fitness technology category is highest for smartwatches, followed by fitness-related apps (30 percent), dedicated wearable fitness activity trackers (27 percent), smart apparel (27 percent) and devices that track sleep patterns (23 percent).

Put into money, CTA’s findings show that sales of health and fitness devices are expected to reach $1.8 billion in revenue in 2015, or 18 percent more than last year. In 2016, this number will increase by another 10 percent.

Sales of health and fitness devices are expected to reach $1.8 billion in revenue in 2015, or 18 percent more than last year.When it comes to device characteristics, 61 percent of fitness users rank monitoring calories burned as the most important characteristic, followed by heart rate (52 percent), steps taken (42 percent), distance (34 percent) and blood pressure (23 percent). For health users, the most desired characteristics are monitoring heart rate (58 percent), calories burned (48 percent), blood pressure (47 percent), steps taken (28 percent) and distance traveled (21 percent).

Most users buy a health or fitness device based on a suggestion from a friend or family member (44 percent), followed by online suggestions (17 percent), a medical professional (11 percent), a corporate wellness program (4 percent) and a salesperson in-store (4 percent). Also, users are willing to share data, with majority of them having no problems to send the information to their physician though some fear data security/data breach issues.

As Shawn DuBravac, Ph.D., chief economist and senior director of research at CTA has put it: “Consumers see the potential for benefits from sharing health and fitness data with friends, family and medical professionals and they expect privacy to be balanced with those benefits.”