EE Times has an interesting piece on the growth of the battery industry thanks to the influx of wearable electronics.

With wearable electronics quickly becoming the fashion these days, demand for batteries to power smart watches, wearable health monitors, and smart glasses will increase tenfold over the next four years, according to an IHS report.

Worldwide revenue for wearable electronics batteries is expected to jump from $6 million in 2014 to $77 million in 2018. Revenue growth will be buoyed by annual shipments for wearable electronic devices, which will reach 56 million units by 2018, according to the IHS Power & Energy report (subscription required).

“Wearable electronics will be the key to sustaining the current very-high-growth levels of battery revenue in consumer electronics,” Thomas McAlpine, a power supply and storage component analyst for IHS, said in a press release. He predicted a boost in shipments for “products geared toward an active lifestyle combining advanced technological trends in miniature computing with newly smart consumer imperatives in fitness and fashion,” including smart watches and smart glass products, such as Google Glass, slated for release this year.

OEMs tend to prefer lithium polymer batteries over lithium ion batteries, since they are lighter and can be designed into a wider range of applications. As a result, lithium polymer batteries will account for 73% of worldwide revenue of wearable electronics batteries in 2018, the report says.

Read more and pick up one of Adafruit’s lithium ion batteries here.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!