WEARABLES
Wearables
Fitness bands, smartwatches, and rings all make the same protocol bet: Bluetooth Low Energy, for the battery life it buys.
A wearable has almost no room for battery, sits within arm's reach of a phone almost all the time, and only needs to move small amounts of data, a heart rate reading, a step count, a notification. Bluetooth Low Energy is built around exactly that profile: a radio that sleeps most of the time and wakes briefly on a schedule, trading range and bandwidth for weeks or months of battery life instead of hours.
The same trade-off shows up past fitness trackers, in BLE beacons used for indoor location and BLE asset tags used to track equipment in a warehouse. Anywhere a battery-powered device needs to report small amounts of data occasionally rather than stream continuously, the BLE math tends to win.
