The Rise of Wearable Electronics: From Consumer Gadgets to Industrial Safety
Wearable electronics have moved far beyond fitness trackers and smartwatches. While consumer wearables capture headlines, the most compelling and technically demanding applications are emerging in industrial environments — and this is where I've spent much of my career.
Having led development of connected-worker wearables for oil and gas, construction, and mining — including ATEX-certified devices deployed on offshore platforms — I've watched this market mature from novelty to necessity. The technical challenges are profound, and the stakes are significantly higher than whether your step count is accurate.
The industrial wearable: a very different design challenge
Consumer wearables optimise for aesthetics, battery life, and app ecosystem. Industrial wearables optimise for safety, reliability, and regulatory compliance — often in environments that actively try to destroy electronics.
Consider the requirements for a connected-worker device in an oil and gas environment. It must be ATEX or IECEx certified for use in potentially explosive atmospheres. It needs to integrate multiple sensors — gas detection, sound exposure, hand-arm vibration, proximity to hazards, GPS positioning, and physiological monitoring. It must communicate reliably via cellular, ISM radio, BLE, and Wi-Fi depending on the deployment context. And it must do all of this while being small enough, light enough, and comfortable enough that a worker will actually wear it for a twelve-hour shift.
The hardest part of industrial wearable design isn't the technology — it's getting workers to wear it. If it's uncomfortable, impractical, or unreliable, it stays in the locker.
This user-adoption challenge drives design decisions that pure technologists often underestimate. It's not enough to build something that works in the lab. It has to survive being dropped, rained on, operated with gloves, and charged by someone who's been working twelve hours in challenging conditions.
MEMS: the engine behind the wearable revolution
One of the key enablers of sophisticated wearable devices is Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. MEMS sensors have transformed what's possible in a wearable form factor.
In the audio domain, MEMS microphones and speakers are digital devices rather than traditional analogue ones, offering improved noise rejection and easier integration. In sensing, MEMS gyroscopes, accelerometers, pressure sensors, flow sensors, and gas sensors have all become available at price points and power budgets that make multi-sensor wearables commercially viable.
The shift from traditional discrete sensors to MEMS has been transformative for BOM cost, PCB real estate, and power consumption. A multi-gas sensor that once required a separate module the size of a matchbox can now be integrated as a single MEMS component. This is what makes it feasible to pack gas detection, motion sensing, environmental monitoring, and connectivity into a device that clips to a worker's belt.
Connectivity in hostile environments
Connectivity is perhaps the most challenging aspect of industrial wearable design. Consumer devices can assume reliable Wi-Fi or cellular coverage. Industrial devices operate on offshore platforms, underground mines, construction sites in remote locations, and inside metal structures that attenuate RF signals.
Through my work at IoT Foundry and as CTO of a wearable technology company, I've deployed solutions using GPRS, Cat-M1, NB-IoT, LoRa, BLE, and ISM radio — often multiple technologies in the same device to provide redundancy and coverage flexibility. The firmware needs to manage seamless fallback between connectivity options, buffer data when no connection is available, and prioritise safety-critical alerts when bandwidth is constrained.
MQTT has become the de facto protocol for wearable-to-cloud communication in industrial settings, and for good reason. Its lightweight publish-subscribe model, quality-of-service levels, and support for intermittent connectivity make it ideal for devices that move in and out of coverage areas. But even MQTT requires careful implementation — message sizing, topic design, and QoS selection all directly impact battery life and data reliability.
The data opportunity: from monitoring to prediction
The real value of industrial wearables isn't just the sensors — it's what you do with the data. During my CTO role, we built machine learning pipelines to transform raw sensor data into actionable insight: predictive fatigue detection, exposure pattern analysis, near-miss identification, and automated compliance reporting.
This is where the convergence of edge computing and cloud analytics becomes critical. You can't send every sensor reading to the cloud in real time — the bandwidth and power costs are prohibitive. Instead, the device needs to perform local preprocessing, feature extraction, and anomaly detection, sending only significant events and aggregated summaries to the cloud for deeper analysis.
For boards and investors evaluating wearable technology companies, the sophistication of the data pipeline is often a better indicator of commercial value than the hardware itself. The sensors are increasingly commoditised; the intelligence built on top of the data is what creates defensible competitive advantage.
What boards need to understand
If you're on the board of a company developing or deploying industrial wearables, there are several critical questions to be asking:
Is the certification strategy sound? ATEX, IECEx, and EMC certification for wearable devices is expensive and time-consuming. A change to the hardware design can invalidate existing certifications. Your engineering team needs to understand certification requirements from the earliest design stages, not as an afterthought.
Is the connectivity architecture resilient? Single-technology connectivity is a single point of failure. The device needs fallback options and the firmware needs to manage transitions gracefully. Ask how the device behaves when it loses connectivity — this is often where poorly designed products fail in the field.
Is the user experience realistic? The best technology in the world is worthless if workers refuse to wear it. Has the product been tested in real working conditions with real users? Not a demo in the boardroom — actual shifts in actual operational environments.
The industrial wearable market is growing rapidly, and the companies that will win are those that combine deep electronics engineering expertise with a genuine understanding of the operational environments where their products must perform. It's a space where technical rigour and practical empathy need to work hand in hand.