Research: Activity tracker shipments to hit 87 million in 2021

activity trackers

In 2015, activity tracker shipments grew almost 80 percent over the previous year, as new players entered the market and sales outside the U.S. took off. And there’s still room for growth, according to ABI Research which forecasts shipment totals to top 87 million in 2021.

“Activity trackers are the current vanguard device for bringing consumers into connected medical services,” Jonathan Collins, Principal Analyst at ABI Research, said in a statement. “As they continue to proliferate, they will spur greater investment in mHealth device development and adoption, as well as the services that can help bring the data these devices collect into health care provision.”

However, the medical device market still awaits the shift to connected devices that has been underway in the consumer market over the past few years. The adoption of connected medical devices rests not just on device availability and appeal, but also on the supporting infrastructure that can drive patient care and operational efficiency from wearable device data collection.

Consumer focused companies such as Apple, Google and Samsung have all begun to develop ways to bring consumer activity data into patient management, while established medical equipment players like Philips and GE Healthcare have launched their own mHealth platforms.

Although activity trackers currently dominate the mHealth wearable space, over the next five years ABI thinks we’ll see new types of mHealth wearables such as smart clothing that will expand the range of tracking alternatives available to consumers.

“In the months ahead, we expect to see a number of key vendors within this competitive landscape expanding partnerships, such as Under Armour and HTC,” concludes Collins. “Those companies will tend to take an application focus with activity trackers, adding in additional sensing capabilities and increasingly looking to expand their technology to different form factors.”