The market for wearable health a fitness tracking gadgets may seem like the wild west, but it won’t for long. Something is taking shape, and the days of rapid and seemingly directionless horizontal spread without clearly defined market verticals emerging are numbered. Players are beginning to address needs that provide significant value to stakeholders with deep pockets.

Specifically, there are two verticals that strike me as slam dunks for innovative players in wearable tech, and while these two rising pillars of wearable health gadgetry are completely different in both theory and practice, I’d be willing to throw major investment dollars behind well-executed designs on either side of the spectrum - if only I had those dollars to throw around.

Remote Patient Monitoring

(Wearables in the "Sick Care" Model)

Recurring emergency visits and interventions related to what, in practice, would be easy-to-montior chronic conditions is creating a massive pit of wasted spending and resources in healthcare today. We have plenty of technology available to develop low-cost remote patient monitoring wearables to supply to patients. These would help forewarn physicians and preempt catastrophic events related to conditions like congestive heart failure, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and chronic wounds or skin ulcers.

Well-designed implementations in these areas would save billions of dollars across the U.S. system - specifically $200 billion over the next 25 years according to a 2009 position paper by the Center for Technology and Aging. The huge penalties hospitals pay for readmissions is the primary financial incentive that I expect to accelerate adoption in healthcare settings (the primary incentive should, of course, be saving humans).

One-off wearable solutions to track only biometrics specific to these conditions will be piling up, but the underlying software systems that organize data from these wearables to fit into existing healthcare structures will be key to any boom in adoption. One important question will be how these systems will communicate with EHR. The flow of money in healthcare software is heavily influenced by legislative mandates (ACA’s EHR and meaningful use mandates in particular) and that might lead product developers to spend way too much time, way too early in the process trying to figure out a decent way to integrate with EHR. Odds are the simplest implementations would ignore EHR completely. The other impediment to more rapid growth is the little hurdle of gaining FDA approval for each new device, but that's far less avoidable issue.

This could slow progress that could otherwise be rapid if only the focus can remain, first-and-foremost, on developing implementation strategies that are simple enough to be managed by existing healthcare system personnel (like Medical Technicians for example). But all my EHR cynicism aside, my core point remains that many product makers will win, and win big once the dust has cleared.

Athletics Analytics

Now to something a little more fun. Did you see the movie, Moneyball? In it Brad Pitt plays famed Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane, who turned a low-budget A’s baseball team into an American League Pennant winner by using statistical analyses to bring in under-valued players. The success of the statistics-driven model used by Beane’s Athletics led to an explosion in the popularity and use of advanced statistics (also known as “Sabermetrics") in baseball, which quickly spread to all major professional sports.

Now instead of talking about a players batting average, you might see players measured by stats like “WAR," or wins-above-replacement. WAR is a complex metric developed by baseball analysts that incorporates all sorts of team, individual, and league-wide statistics to approximate how valuable any player is to their team in terms of the number of wins he adds to their season total. Wins generally means more fans buying tickets and gear. Enough wins also means playoffs, which means more games each year that fans will buy tickets for, and at a premium price no less. In short, advanced metrics have given professional sports organizations a new way to “engineer" revenue.

So where might wearables enter this conversation? Great question. Let’s say we’ve used these advanced metrics to pick a bunch of players to pay oodles of money to “engineer" some more wins (more revenue). Wouldn’t we want to do everything we can to monitor their performance in order to prevent injuries? What if a wearable was monitoring a pitchers throwing motion to tell us when his release point has changed by one or two degrees? Maybe we would’ve thought his losing streak was something mental, when in fact, a simple mechanical adjustment would get right on track. Or better yet, what if we could identify a tweaked muscle that is causing the change before it puts too much stress on his joints, and leads to a major injury that leaves $15 million in salary sitting on your bench for an entire year?

Now our sports organization has not only engineered a team that can win more, we’ve also engineered insurance policies for keeping those wins coming. We’ve already seen wearables begin to translate down to the amateur and youth levels (consumer level), for example this watch that monitors your jump shot, or this wristband that keeps your tennis form tight. These opportunities exist because when it comes to sports, you have to put in the work to refine and perfect each skill to get better. A young player spends years refining and perfecting his jump shot, and that means the potential (if the devices can provide smart enough feedback) for something many of the more common wearables on the market seem to lack - long term engagement.

In my opinion, this market is ripe for the taking from top to bottom. Expect to see more and more products taking advantage, and sooner rather than later. Just take Adidas’ announcement that wearable tracking technology is built right in to every team's 2014 World Cup uniforms as case-in-point.

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