Our advanced material portfolio delivers the durability, comfort and confidence consumers demand for wearable electronics including virtual reality headsets, fitness bands and smart watches.
By offering flexibility and design freedom, our versatile TPU can be easily colored to provide options for different moods or occasions.
Our innovative solutions for wearable electronics offer a variety of benefits for designers, producers and consumers including being recyclable* to support growing sustainability initiatives.
With the growing popularity of wearable technology, more and more people are relying on smartwatches and fitness trackers to monitor heart rate and collect other daily health metrics. Typical products include fitness trackers, smart watches, heart rate monitors, smart earphones, wearable speakers, VR/AR devices and GPS tracking devices.
In the summer of 2019, Lubrizol invested in a research study to help reinforce our understanding of how our TPU needs to perform in wearables to help satisfy consumer needs. The wearables study was designed to help further develop innovative ideas and to provide validation of current research and development efforts to.The study was created to help Lubrizol understand the journey of a smart watch owner from the purchase of the smart watch itself to when a new watch band is needed.
What Lubrizol learned is consumers are so “in love” with their smart watch when first purchased that they often do not think about their watch band until there is a trigger such as:
“If it's itchy…things like that concern me, I wouldn't buy a watch (band) that might irritate my skin.”
– Smart Watch Owner from New Jersey
“When I'm sweating, it pinches, or when I'm putting it back on, it pinches, but it's more of hair getting stuck or sliding on my (wrist)… it's more annoying than painful.”
– Fitness Band Owner from New Jersey
*Recyclability is based on access to a readily available standard recycling program that supports such materials. Products may not be available in all areas.
**Bio-based content as certified in accordance with ASTM D-6866
