  Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent
years have seen a paradigm shift in personal mobile devices, from smartphones
towards wearable devices. Wearable devices come in many different forms
targeting different application scenarios. Among these, the fitness wearable
devices (FWDs) are proven to be one of the forms that intrigue the market and
occupy an increasing trend in terms of the market share. Nevertheless, although
the fitness wearable devices nowadays are functionally self-contained based on
the advanced sensor, computation, and communicative technologies, there is
still a large gap to truly satisfy the target customer group, i.e., accessible
to and usable by a larger quantity of users. This fuels the research area on
applying the universal design principles to fitness wearable devices. In this
survey, we first present the background of FWDs and show the acceptance and
adaption challenges of the corresponding user groups. We then review the
universal design principle and how it and its relative approaches could be used
in FWDs. Further, we collect the available FWDs that bear the universal design
principles in their development circles. Last, we open up the discussion based
on the surveyed literature and provide the insight of potential future work.
