So, What’s Really Going On With Wearable Tech?

If I said ‘wearable tech‘ to you, what would you think of?

With big names like Google Glass and the imminent release of the iWatch hitting the headlines almost daily and wrists everywhere modelling fitness trackers like the Fitbit and the FuelBand, it wouldn’t take you long to conjure up an example.

A couple of years ago, technology that you’d wear every day to enrich your day-to-day life was not exactly widespread.

The last two years has seen a massive surge in the production of wearable technology products and what was once deemed as futuristic geekdom is now pretty common stuff.

There’s a lot said about wearable tech, and what one journalist writes off as ‘over-hyped’ is another’s game-changer. It can be tough to work out whether people seem to think wearable tech is a great idea, or whether they aren’t actually keen.

Being lucky enough to have a tool on-hand to monitor what people out there in the big, bad world think about them, we decided to conduct some research and analysed over 8 million conversations around the subject to see if we could find out anything interesting. And that we did.

Year on year the conversation around wearables has exploded – increasing a staggering 190% when you compare the first quarter of last year (973,300 mentions) to that of this year (2,816,814 mentions).

MASSIVE numbers, there.

One of the interesting things that came from this research – perhaps that we weren’t expecting – is that chatter about wearable tech is no longer confined to the water cooler in the engineering department.

Discussion about wearables has become far more commonplace in mainstream society, and we’re seeing more types of people talking about it, and in more kinds of places. Just like with smart phones or tablets almost a decade ago, we’re on the cusp of a cultural shift that reflects our changing attitudes towards how we live with technology.

To show you more, our friends at Brilliant Noise created a great infographic using our Brandwatch Analytics data that picks out some key points.

What do you think of wearable tech? Do you own any yourself? Let us know!