Recently in China wearable devices have paved the way for disruptive innovation in the market, armed with low prices and new services similar to the comparably mature smartphone market. After the release of smartwatches from the leading companies such as Samsung, LG, and Sony, Chinese global electronics companies such as Huawei and Xiaomi have followed suit. They have developed innovative devices with accompanying services. Consumers can in fact already buy hundreds of different wearable devices from websites such as; Alibaba.
Moreover, this trend for new services and a plethora of wearable devices has been proliferating in the other Asian countries as well. In India, Le Chal has introduced smart shoes, this product integrates with Google Maps through Bluetooth and guides the user wearing the shoes to their destination. Asia University in Singapore won the Red Dot Award with a design concept for a set of rings and bracelets that translates sign language into voice or text. These translation devices are expected to help people who do not understand sign language to efficiently communicate with others who need to use sign. These examples reinforce the feasibility of this emerging technology.
In China new services are being built around the wearable devices with the help of OEM's and service providers. In the healthcare market the rapid aging population is driving up the cost of nursing and patient care and in turn advancing thedevelopment of new medical and healthcare services using wearable devices. Companies such as Etcomm and Dataclub have teamed up to provide services for home care and home diagnosis, and medical wearable devices are being manufactured by several companies such as Huawei and Tenghai Syiyang.
Compared to the smartphone market, however, the wearable device market has distinct differences that need to be ironed out before the market can grow to its full potential. The software development cost is high due to the small-quantity batch production of such devices. Security to protect the privacy of users is an issue and the limited battery power due to the small size of devices is challenging.
In order to curb the cost of software development, ARM has partnered with Hisilicon, Spreadtrum, ZTE, Allwinner, Mediatek, and Qualcomm to fund the Linaro Community which optimizes several Linux based Rich OS's for the ARM architecture and enables the state-of-the-art technologies that ARM has to offer. In addition to this partnership ARM has established the mbed community, this platform provides not only SW components but productive programing frameworks, tools and collaborative workflows of the web in order to support "simple wearable devices".
In the security domain, Cortex-A based devices can take advantage of the Trusted Execution Environments using "TrustZone", simple devices can use the end-to-end security solution provided by mbed community.
When considering power consumption ‘Right Sized Computing’ is important, optimized implementation and processes are essential. Optimizations can be achieved by using an ARM core that is configured for low power consumption and application-specific configurations using the appropriate physical library. Additionally, mbed OS has been designed to achieve the low power consumption.
ARM and its partners plan to share all solutions in the upcoming Wearable Week China (Dec. 15th-21st).