Wearable technologies have evolved over the last few decades, with 2014 known as “Year of Wearables” in Forbes and other media outlets. Wareable online magazine stated in 2015 that 84 million wearable devices were sold that year, and by 2019 that figure would be 245 million wearable fitness bracelets and other devices. However, a recent report from Statisitca, an online business data analysis platform, suggests that the number is actually closer to three times that amount, roughly 742 million. Such reports show how the industry has grown especially in the last five to ten years. Many tech companies and start-ups have been vying to make the next great wearable device or “killer app” for body-data tracking. Physiological, body-based, sensor devices, and electronic technologies have become cable-free, WiFi-enabled, smaller, more powerful, and sewable, using smart or electronic textiles, conductive fibres and other smart materials. Hardware is increasingly smaller, less visible, and more widely connected; data is more seamlessly and ubiquitously harvested. There has been concurrently rapid and extensive explosion in the development of electronic materials, conductive inks and threads, and new smart materials, fabrics, and textiles for use in various fashion, sports, fitness, medical, military, and governmental projects, as well as for artistic and performance projects, such as those by artists like Kasia Molga’s Human Sensor project for the Invisible Dust organisation.
In this chapter I provide an overview of the complex concerns around wearables that draw on datafication and privacy such as using people’s physiological data to sell to health insurance companies to make money off our body data. I begin by discussing the politics of datafication and privacy. I then move on to focus on art, performance and design with wearables and e-textiles, giving examples of my own collaborative wearable performance work and research, to reflect upon some of the novel and productive ways we might think about wearables for future directions in the design of wearables and in the marketplace.
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