The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is set to transform manufacturing – and according to a new report from Zebra Technologies, the number of organisations achieving a fully connected factory will rise ‘dramatically’ in the coming five years.

According to the company’s 2017 Manufacturing Vision Study, almost two thirds (64%) of manufacturers say they expect to be fully connected, using a combination of technologies including RFID, wearables and automated systems, by 2022. Half of...

Xiaomi secured top spot as the largest wearables vendor for the first time in the second quarter of 2017, according to new figures from Strategy Analytics.

The Chinese firm shipped 3.7 million units, capturing 17% of the marketshare, overtaking Fitbit (3.4m) and Apple (2.8m) into second and third place respectively. Overall sales grew 8% to 21.6 million in Q217, from 20 million this time last year.

The figures make for an interesting comparison with long-time wearable watchers IDC, whose

Xiaomi and Apple cannot be separated as the top wearables vendors in the first quarter of 2017, pushing long-time leader Fitbit back, according to the latest figures from IDC.

The analyst firm, posting its latest Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker, found Apple was the biggest growth in branded device shipments – excluding OEM sales – year over year, going from 2.2 million to 3.6 million. Xiaomi technically finished above Apple, with a 14.7% market share compared to 14.6%, but with both on...

Global shipments of wearable devices hit 22 million units in the first quarter of 2017 with Apple overtaking Fitbit to become the world’s largest wearables vendor, according to Strategy Analytics.

In the company’s latest report, Strategy Analytics states that the global wearables shipments figure saw an increase of 21% on an annual basis from 18.2 million in Q1 2016, owing to a stronger demand for new smartwatch models in North America, Western Europe and Asia.

Neil Mawston, executive director at...

After a slowdown in 2016, the overall wearables market is expected to return to strong growth, according to new data from IDC’s worldwide quarterly wearable device tracker.

New vendors, emerging form factors, and an expanded number of retail outlets will drive worldwide wearable device shipments from 102.4 million in 2016 to 237.5 million in 2021, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3%.

Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst for IDC mobile device trackers, said: “With the shift...

Unobtrusive wearable tech used to be an oxymoron, but some of today’s technologies are getting close to achieving this lofty goal — devices that function so naturally, wearers don’t even notice they have them on. And it has potential to alter the healthcare industry in major ways. 

Monitoring patients for overall health and to track recovery has become a round-the-clock endeavor. Unobtrusive wearable devices are able to gather some of the highest quality data available, and their mostly...

The human brain is the most complex system in the known universe. It is imbued with enormous potential that we have yet to fully understand or to harness. But we’re making progress, for many good reasons.

By studying how the human brain functions and how it responds to stimuli, we can potentially train our minds for optimal performance and, perhaps, overcome physical disabilities or detect neurological abnormalities for treatment. We stand now on the cusp of what has been called ‘The Fourth...

Opinion Hearables are among the tens of billions of IoT devices that will be in use by the end of this decade. That volume means that no matter where you go in the near future, there will be an increasingly good chance that an IoT device will be around to hear what you say.

Hearables can be grouped into two broad categories: stationary devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, and wearables...

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2016 has been a tough year for the wearable tech industry. From the Basis Peak failure up to the deaths of Pebble, Vector and 

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AT&T is planning to launch its new LTE-M network in the San Francisco market as a pilot project.

Slated to start in November 2016, the LTE-M technology is said to connect a wide variety of IoT solutions such as smart utility meters, asset monitoring, vending machines, alarm systems, fleet, heavy equipment, mHealth and wearables.

The implementation of the LTE-M technology will result in lower costs for modules that connect IoT devices to the LTE network; longer battery...