siliconindia | | April 20199making Smart Socks (Sensoria), Smart Belts, Smart Underwear and the like. These smart clothing have various applications in Health & Safety mon-itoring of Factory Workers, Transpor-tation, Emergency services and also in typical Lifestyle & Fashion verticals. Additional derivatives of smart cloth-ing include `Smart Patches' that can monitor glucose levels, sweat, muscle movements and so on.The smart clothing industry is ex-pected to increase from 3.3 million units shipped this year to 21.6 million units in 2021.The Indian Wearables MarketThe Wearables market in India is quite nascent and is mainly growing in the fitness tracker segment for the mobile and millennials generation. Accord-ing to International Data Corporation (IDC), total shipments were 2.5 million units in 2016. Wearables at less than 50$ per unit continues to dominate the market due to the price sensitivity of the Indian market. A new vendor like Fossil's made their entry into Indian wearable market along with new mod-els from vendors like Apple, Xiaomi and Samsung.Some Home-Grown Wearables CompaniesAt the recently concluded India's First-Ever Wearable Technologies Conference 2017, held in Banga-lore, it was very apparent that In-dian Start-ups have a lot to offer on the Wearables front. TerraBlue, a healthcare wearable start-up, is fo-cused on offering solutions for Ep-ilepsy, Stress management and the like through a combination of `Smart Glove' and an analytical engine on the backend. RetiSense, an athletic wear start-up, has innovated around a `Smart Insole' for Athletes who would want to monitor the stress on their joints whilst running. They have now moved up the value chain to offer a diagnos-tic & rehabilitation solution for sports medicine clinics. Apart from these, other start-up companies like Hug Innovations and GOQII have been first movers in the Wearables' market space in India. On the other end, big players like TATA, have used `Design Thinking' principles to co-innovate on a `Factory Safety' Wearable. How can Indian Start-Ups Win in Wearable Market, GLOBALLY?Indian Start-Ups have a great oppor-tunity to make GLOBAL products by innovating on several challenging problems that most of the other mar-kets don't see or face. For example, India is going through a big digital transformation in several economic spheres. The Gov-ernment's big push for a `Cashless Economy' is tremendous opportunity to build solutions through a combi-nation of Wearables with Biometrics and/or NFC. The same platform can be extended to other secure transac-tions in Railways, Retail, Tourism and other Public Utilities. Addition of sensors like bio-sensors, gas-sensors, etc can position these wearables in the B2B spaces like Healthcare, Industrial Safety and so on.Once scale is achieved or even projected, it is easy for manufactur-ers and ecosystem players to establish their bases here in India and export to the world. One need not see beyond the Automobile Industry to see what India can achieve if it has a right com-bination of entrepreneurial enthusi-asm and Government backing with the right policy measures. To further help Start-Ups in their Wearables' Journey, we at Wearable Technologies (AG) are about to kick-start an Accelerator with themes running from Smart Wearables to Smart Textiles. Several entities have already come forward to supporting this endeavour. Figure 1Market Projections for Categories of Wearables (in Mn USD)Mohan Kumar
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