The single greatest beneficiary of the mobile phone wars was the sensor industry. As mobile phone manufacturers fought for market-share, they kicked off a race to offer better and more innovative features to customers. This meant finding ways to package into modern mobile phones, a bundle of sensors that could deliver a more data points for use by the "app" ecosystem. Mobile phones began to incorporate accelerometers, GPS receivers, gyroscopes and a number of other electronic sensors. It wasn't long before economies of scale brought the cost of these components within the grasp of smaller companies that began to incorporate them into innovative products intended to be worn.

At the same time another technological development that had been a long time building steam, reached a significant inflexion point. Cellular networks began to offer 4G speeds, resulting in the cost and time taken to download even relatively large files over the internet reducing to relative insignificance. At the same time, data storage costs fell so rapidly that cloud services like Dropbox, iCloud and Google Drive began to make effectively unlimited online storage, affordable to retail consumers. These two factors allowed device manufacturers to design devices without worrying about onboard storage, as they could use cellular services to transfer the data collected directly onto cloud storage services.

This unpremeditated concantenation of circumstances has moved us further along the road to a Jetsons future than any other scientific advance to date. The age of affordable wearables is truly upon us with an increasing variety of products currently available in the consumer market addressing a wide range of functions.

But as with all tipping points, relatively little thought has been given to regulation. At the forefront of the debate is the concern around privacy as millions of devices that have, for the past 2-3 years been uploading a mind-boggling range of sensitive personal information up onto cloud servers, begin to deal in this data in new and unprecedented ways. But more insidious and potentially dangerous is the liability risk that will start to come to the fore as users begin to rely on wearable medical devices to make potentially life altering decisions as to their health.

As our computational devices begin to integrate more fully with our person, existing laws will need to be re-evaluated to redefine the balance between regulation and the need to allow this new and deeply beneficial technological directional change to be fully exploited.