With inter-compatibility, standardization, etc. still at their early stage,
response with aggressive standardization strategy is required

It is pointed out that, for wearable market to overcome ‘Chasm’ and succeed in popularization, solving compatibility issue and establishment of standardization is urgently required. Viewing that “smart wearable market still has many unsolved issues and discussion of its standardization is just at its beginning stage,” Dr. Chun, Jong-Hong of ETRI said that “aggressive standardization strategy and response is demanded and we should approach the standardization from the user’s point of view.”

According to Gartner, world sales volume of wearable is projected to reach USD 17.5 billion by 2019. Total sales volume of wearable this year is expected to record USD 28.7 billion and, among the sum, smart watch section is forecasted to take up as much as USD 11.5 billion. In particular, smart watch market is expected to record annual growth rate of 30% by 2017.

However, on its way to becoming a new growth engine of ICT industry, wearable devices still face various technological hurdles in terms of hardware such as battery and wide-bandwidth communication as well as design element.

 
 ▲Wristband type wire battery introduced by LG Chem Last October was developed to cope with short battery life of wearable devices.

Inter-compatibility standard for smart wearable applications proposed

Smart Wearable Application Inter-operability Reference Model proposed by Dr. Chun, Jong-Hong of ETRI is a smart wearable stack composed of five layers (from Hardware layer to Application layer) defined by referring to OSI’s seven layers (from Physical layer to Application layer).

Korea proposed establishment of international standard enactment technical committee (TC) for WSD. But sharp conflict between Korea and Japan is becoming the stumbling block against the goal. To overcome it, Korean government plans to develop standardization roadmap for wearable through its national standard coordinator project. For each of six technical fields, 10 to 15 experts in the field are going to participate in the project and create roadmap accordingly.

Suggesting that a policy interconnecting establishment of wearable TC to cooperation with Japan needs to be implemented, a standard coordinator said that far more standards need to be developed than technologies. “The roadmap is expected to act as a guideline for the development of anticipatory standards for the relevant fields,” he added.