According to data released by market research firm IDC, the global wearable device market shipped 114.2 million units in the second quarter of 2021. At the same time, IDC predicts that global shipments of wearable devices will grow from 450 million in 2020 to nearly 800m in 2025.

Among them, smartwatches and earwear devices / smart headphones account for nearly 80% of the total shipments of wearable devices. With the increasing enrichment of its application functions, in addition to realizing the basic functions such as payment, call / Wechat Synchronize, health monitoring has gradually become a new development direction of smartwatch and smart headphones.

Blood Pressure and Blood Sugar Become new Vents

The core of wearable devices is miniaturization and integration, which is an important reason why smartwatches with multiple functions and strong life attributes can be popularized rapidly. Second, compared with more professional and accurate portable medical devices, the appearance of smartwatches is undoubtedly more suitable for daily long-term wear.

At present, blood pressure monitoring has not yet formed a large-scale and daily application on smartwatches/bracelets or other wearable terminals. The portable blood pressure monitoring devices on the market are mainly divided into four categories according to technology devices that only use mobile phone cameras, pure optical sensors, optical and other sensor fusion devices, and indirect data devices. These methods do not measure blood pressure directly but measure blood pressure changes, and then measure the pressure waves generated by blood pressure in the artery through algorithm and data analysis, and there is no way to get the absolute value of blood pressure like cuff measurement.

Whether data can be obtained non-invasively through wearable devices is the key. For example, such as blood sugar and blood lipids, current sensors are difficult to detect in non-invasive cases, which means that wearability cannot be achieved. Manufacturers such as Apple and Huawei are expected to embed non-invasive physiological signal detection in the next generation of wearable devices to monitor blood pressure and blood sugar, which are critical to the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Challenges Remain in Wearable Medical Devices

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