Research Articles

IDTechEx, leading market and technology research firm, have released their most comprehensive report covering the wearable technology industry. "Wearable Technology Forecasts 2019-2029" includes historic market data back to 2010 and 10-year market forecasts for 48 different types of wearable electronic product. It includes dedicated and detailed chapters covering each of the key product areas within this diverse space, including smartwatches and fitness trackers, AR, VR & MR, electronic skin patches, smart clothing, hearables (including headphones and hearing aids) and more.

Flexible electronics and smart bandages are key to cost savings in the future of advanced wound care. Advanced wounds, referring to those that are non-healing for more than 4 weeks, are on the rise around the world. This is because there are an increasing number of people with poor wound healing ability, including the rising number of elderly people over 65 years of age, and the rising number of people with Type 2 diabetes.

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It is nonsense to forecast pure electric cars costing the same as traditional ones, then life continuing much as usual. The up-front price of pure electric cars will be dropping below that of internal combustion engine ones around 2025. The fundamentals are now clear. Short range electric cars will continue to sell badly because of range and financial anxiety: their resale value after three years can be down 80%. 200 miles/ 320 km is the tipping point where resale value can be only 40% down on purchase price. See the IDTechEx report, "Electric Vehicles 2020-2030" for the full picture of 100 categories of electric vehicle EV by land, water and air.

Flexible and foldable high-performance barrier or encapsulation technology had long represented a technology challenge. The industry spent a decade and a half optimizing the approaches and the processes to achieve large-area production-grade results. The development however has not ended. Indeed, the commercial journey towards flexible and foldable devices is only just beginning. As such, the development of flexible barrier technologies still has far to travel.

There is no doubt that 3D bioprinting is a technology of the future. Imagine being able to print a kidney or liver on demand. This is a stark contrast to the long wait for a donor organ today. Currently, the average wait time for a liver is 4 to 5 months, and 2.5 to 3 years for a kidney in the UK. Despite the acceleration in 3D bioprinting research we have witnessed in the past few years, we are still far from the holy grail of printed organs for transplant.

In electric vehicles, China is not what it used to be. Electric bike demand collapsed five years ago, and electric bus demand followed two years ago. With electric buses, the reason was entirely a precipitous drop in government financial support of demand and production, the peak being accentuated by pulling forward to grab subsidies while there were available. In 2020 they will be zero but despite this, in 2027 China plans that full electrification of its bus fleet will be complete.

The next wave of devices for diabetes management is wearable insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. These devices are already in use today and uptake is increasing. The devices remove a significant number of pain points from current technologies.

IDTechEx has studied the printed electronics market since 2002. Of course, we're not just looking at materials that are printed, but also devices that are flexible, organic, large area—in reality, there isn't a good phrase to encompass the huge set of enabling materials, processes and components that are radically changing electronics as we know it. The phrase "not conventional electronics" doesn't really cover it, as some aspects of printed electronics are mature today, having been used for many years.

Tiny infrared lasers offer 3D sensing functionality for consumer electronics like smartphones and robots like self-driving cars. In this article, the technology consulting firm IDTechEx demonstrate how advances in laser technology and decreases in laser price enable novel applications in optical sensing.

Commercial efforts around electronic textiles have been prominent for at least 25 years, starting with early patents and then early products throughout the 1990s. IDTechEx's latest research report in the area "E-Textiles 2019-2029: Technologies, Markets and Players", looks at how e-textile products have changed over time, both in terms of the hardware and the more general business model.

Shortage of lithium-ion batteries is probable. Too few gigafactories. Too many burning batteries: factories shut to sort out their problems. The US-China trade war cuts off materials. Inadequate lithium or cobalt mining.