Fitbit and Samsung market leaders in fitness bands and smart watch sector, reckons Canalys

ABI Research recently licked its finger and raised it to the breeze, predicting 90 million wearable devices will be shipped in 2014.

Now rival market intelligence outfit Canalys has got more specific (if more pessimistic), suggesting 17 million wearable bands will ship in 2014. It reckons 9 million will be fitness bands like Fitbit Force, while 8 million will be smart watches like Pebble.

Shipments are predicted to rise to 23 million units in 2015; a 35 percent rise.

Looking at the current situation, Canalys has considered the market share of the key competitors in each sector. For what it calls "basic wearable bands", it gives Fitbit a 58 percent of the global market, followed by Jawbone at 21 percent.

That's probably about right as general consensus - which I agree with - is that Fitbit's devices are the best, with Jawbone, Nike and the rest struggling to catch up.

Surprisingly, however, Canalys thinks that Samsung is leading when it comes to smart watches. This is surprisingly, as though the company has spend tens of millions of marketing dollars, its Galaxy Gear watch is generally considered to be useless.

Similarly, devices from second placed Sony have not found much critical acclaim, leaving Pebble - in third place with 16 percent market share - in a stronger position than the numbers suggest.

Predicting 90 million wearable devices shipped in 2014

As demonstrated at CES 2014, wearables are *the* explosive industry sector.

Which is why the all market intelligence companies are frantically releasing their views of just how large the market can be.

The latest outfit to chance its arm is ABI Research, which reckons that 90 million wearable computing devices will be shipped in 2014.

The majority of this - it predicts - will be from healthcare and the sports and activity sectors - the latter driven by health-lite concerns about weight and obesity. ABI Research doesn't think devices such as Google Glass and smart watches like Pebble, while driving consumer interest, won't be commercially successful, however.

"The next twelve months will be a critical period for the acceptance and adoption of wearable devices," says ABI's senior analyst Joshua Flood.

"Healthcare and sports and activity trackers are rapidly becoming mass-market products. On the flipside, wearable devices like smart watches need to overcome some critical obstacles.

"Aesthetic design, more compelling use cases, battery life and lower price points are the main inhibitors."

I.e. wearable devices need to be nice to wear.

Other companies have based their view on the industry around its financial value. Back in 2013, Gartner says it would be worth $10 billion in 2016, while Juniper Research takes the view of $19 billion in 2018.

Softbank invests in NeuroSky for "biosensor technology solutions"

When it comes to wearable technology, it might seem like the brain activity brigade have fallen over the cutting-edge.

Companies such as US outfit NeuroSky have been working on devices that detect and use brain waves for years - at least in terms of applications such as gaming.

It's never really got to point of launching consumer hardware though, and that's despite raising over $40 million.

Now, however, NeuroSky has hooked up with Japanese conglomerate Softbank in what's being called a "significant investment from SoftBank Corp. to form a strategic partnership with SoftBank Mobile Corp.".

The deal will see NeuroSky working on real-time personalized health and wellness services to be delivered over the mobile internet. Significantly, these will be in the area of electrocardiography and multi-function cardio monitoring rather than brain waves. 

Let's start tracking from the beginning...

I've always viewed predictions of market sector size to be worthless.

Even those analysts who do have a good grasp of market dynamics, and who do take a robust approach to generating decent current numbers, don't have a crystal ball.

On that basis maybe they can 'predict' how the market will change over the next couple of years, but anything more longterm than two years is clearly beyond the accuracy of the currently available information.

That means even the best analysts are guessing. And that's why the only reason predictions of market sector size are interesting is in retrospect - basically to see how wrong our assumptions were.

On that basis, according to the BBC, these are some of the market predictions for the future size of the wearable technology market.

Juniper Research: $1.4 billion in 2013. $19 billion in 2018.

Gartner: $10 billion in 2016.

Credit Suisse: $50 billion in 2018.

As for my view, I think it depends on whether wearable technology remains a consumer market - mainly for sports fans who want to track their performance - or whether it breaks out hard into general medical practice.

In the case of the latter, $50 billion is the ballpark by 2018. In the case of the former, it's $10 billion.