ABI Research says the sports and health mobile application market will grow to be worth over $400 million (£258 million) in 2016, up from $120 million in 2010. Much of that growth is expected to be driven by the ability of mobile handsets to connect to wearable sports and fitness devices.
Sports and fitness apps are predicted to dominate the m-health application market, although there’ll also be an increase in apps related to home monitoring systems, personal emergency response services and remote healthcare monitoring applications.
Jonathan Collins, principal analyst at ABI Research, said “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. 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.”
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