While fitness bands, smartwatches and even smartglasses are becoming household terms, there is a another realm of wearables positively overflowing with creativity, innovation and unorthodox devices. This segment represents a large and rapidly growing basket of emerging devices designed to benefit the user by informing, enhancing, adorning, protecting and even correcting. 

Spanning devices that range from sensor-laden jewelry to smart clothing, shoes and helmets, it represents some of the most fertile ground for IoT and integration into big data analytics. Indeed, the “Other” category within SA’s latest wearables outlook is expected to see unit shipments grow an impressive 12x by the end of the decade. 

I recently visited the Wearables World Congress in San Francisco to experience some of these innovations first hand. So called ‘self-regulation’ offerings were among the most intriguing on display and will be donned by users seeking to initiate ‘virtuous cycles’ of biometric feedback capable of optimizing good/ healthy/ mindful states, and correcting bad ones.

Slouch much? The Lumo Lift is designed detect torso lean, and prompt you to sit up straight or stand taller in order to help you develop better posture and a healthier back. It can be worn as a piece of jewelry or hidden under your clothes, and you can easily check your results over time with its accompanying smartphone app. 

Train your brain. The Muse will scan brain waves and intelligently relay them back to you in real time via a smartphone app for “focused attention training exercises”. This helps automate proven techniques allowing you to optimize wellbeing. With the Muse, you can just slip on a headset and monitor the companion app to help achieve your mediation goals, be it a more relaxed state… or higher level of consciousness.

 

More for practitioners than consumers, I was especially impressed by two relatively affordable headsets from Emotiv that are capable of bringing even more sophisticated EEG / brainwave processing from clinical settings to everyday environments. Emotiv’s headsets (the US$ 399 EPOC and US$299 Insight model) employ proprietary dry polymer sensors to facilitate the kind of brain activity monitoring that previously required wet saline sensor node connections to the scalp. 

Mental commands anyone?

Steer your car by willing it (click image for video)

Last up, it's not exactly a device but worth mentioning is Sensum’s software platform. It can aggregate, structure and analyze biosensor datastreams to offer marketers a more complete emotional/ physiological profile of focus group participants. The ability to monitor and help  interpret the visceral responses in the field is powerful tool and Sensum provides the platform and API’s to do it.