Egypt's wearables developers hopeful in the face of hardship

The global wearable technology sector is already a multi-billion dollar industry. Yet Egypt is lagging behind in the race to create an iPod-esque market beater.

Inventors around the world are pumping out all kinds of digitally-enabled gear from jackets that will help you get home, to the Lebanese invention Instabeat that will measure your health stats while swimming*, Sony’s “life-logging” band, and, of course, the controversial Google Glass.

It’s a sector that IHS analyst Shane Walker estimates could be worth $30 billion USD in 2018, up from the $10 billion it is now.

“Wearables moved from comic-book fantasy to mundane reality in the past decade thanks to multisensor combination packages and the low-power wireless chips that support them,” he wrote in the first quarter of 2014.

But in Egypt, despite the country’s wealth of computer engineers, only a handful of companies have moved into the wearable technology space. The small club includes Mubser, a year-old company that’s developed a belt and headset kit called Sensify which helps visually impaired people avoid obstacles. And there’s Drime, a company that only came together at Cairo’s Startup Weekend three weeks ago and intends to build an app-and-bracelet combo to help people better manage their time.

Original article by Rachel Williamson

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Egypt’s wearables developers hopeful in the face of hardship