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production value of the wearable devices will reach 10 billion US dollars. Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC) in
Taiwan also points out that its market scale of 2018 will be 14,500 million wearable devices, which will be a huge jump. The
major applications of wearable devices, apart from acting as the second monitor of a smartphone, providing information
and sending messages, are more persuasive in the fields of quantify self, sports leisure and health management. The global
brands or enterprises like Nike, Adidas, Garmin and Google, etc. start to move into the sports industry. These signals all
indicates the substantial economic values of wearable device market.
Wearable technology
Over these years, the development of Micro Electro Mechanical System, MEMS, has entered a mature stage. Based on the
theories of sports science and sports biomechanics, it is much easier to detect human movements. The human-body signal
sensor measures more precisely and the size also gets smaller. Thus, it’s easier to carry around and the applications in the
sports science are much more common. Currently, the most widely-used sensors include the Accelerometer (see picture 1),
Gyroscope, Global Position System (GPS) as well as Heart Rate monitor.
Picture 1: Tri-Axial Accelerometer (left) and wireless accelerometer model (right)
Accelerometer and gyroscope use the piezoelectric material to detect linear acceleration and angular velocity
parameters in sport science and use the output magnitude of voltage as the testing result. In the recent years, these
two sensors become very popular because they are applied to the well-known game, Wii. Afterwards, they are also
used in the consumer electronics such as mobile phone, watches and sports bands, etc. Appling the accelerometer
theory, manufacturers produce the mobile physical-activity monitoring instrument for a long period of time like Caltrac
and ActiGraph. Besides, they are small and have fair prices, they do not cause disturbance upon physical activities.
Therefore, they are widely used in the walking or running researches. Also, companies use tri-axial accelerometer to