The sports and health mobile application
market will grow to over $400 million in 2016, up from $120 million in 2010.
The growth will be spurred by the ability
of mobile handsets to connect to wearable devices that in turn can deliver new
functionality, accuracy, and appeal to sports and fitness applications.
Mobile phones will become increasingly
important within the healthcare market, including home monitoring systems for
aging users, personal emergency response services, and remote healthcare
monitoring applications.
Sports and fitness will dominate the mobile
health application market. Mobile handset adds new ways to access and support
healthcare applications.
“Downloadable apps are moving the sports
tracking device market from proprietary devices to mobile phones, but adoption
has been limited by the data they can collect. However, with the connectivity
that Bluetooth Smart will embed in mobile handsets, wearable devices will bring
greater detail to mobile handsets,” said Jonathan Collins, principal analyst at
ABI Research.
Athletic equipment players have already
moved to support handset applications by either using proprietary or
battery-draining traditional Bluetooth wireless. Traditional players such as
Garmin, who recently launched its first handset application for this market,
and Polar have delivered high-end specialist systems.
Over the next five years, these players
will increasingly have to compete directly with the mobile handset. They will
also face a slew of start-ups and new entrants offering applications, online
communities, and wearable devices offering a range of applications and services.
As applications increasingly become part of
a bundle that ships with wearable devices, revenues from mobile applications
will lag behind the growth in app downloads. Mobile application downloads will
actually grow at nearly twice the rate of revenues between 2010 and 2016, with
more than a billion downloads annually by 2016.