Application Design for Wearable Computing

Book excerpt: Annotation This lecture describes application design for wearable computing, providing a blend of experiencebased insights, learning in application development, and guidelines on how to frame problems and address a specifi c design context, followed by more detailed issues and solution approaches at the next level of the application development. The lecture takes the viewpoint of a potential designer or researcher in this fi eld and aims to present such an integrated material in one place. Designing wearable computer interfaces requires attention to many different factors because of the computers closeness to the body and its use while performing other tasks. Among the most challenging questions facing wearable-computer designers are user needs and interactions. For the purposes of discussion, we have created the UCAMP framework, which consists of the following factors: user, corporal, attention, manipulation, and perception. Each of these factors and their importance has been described. A number of example prototypes developed by the authors, as well as the other researchers, have been used to illustrate these concepts. Wearable computers have established their fi rst foothold in several application domains, such as vehicle and aircraft maintenance and manufacturing, inspection procedures, language translation, and other areas. The lecture proceeds by describing the next step in the evolution of wearable computers, namely context awareness. Context-aware computing takes into account a users state and surroundings, and the mobile computer modifi es its behavior based on this information. A users context can be quite rich, consisting of attributes such as physical location, physiological state, personal history, daily behavioral patterns, and so forth. If a human assistant were given such context, he or she would make decisions in a proactive fashion, anticipating user needs, and acting as a proactive assistant. The goal is to enable mobile computers to play an analogous role, exploiting context information to signifi cantly reduce demands on human attention. Context-aware intelligent agents can deliver relevant information when a user needs that information. These data make possible many exciting new applications, such as augmented reality, context-aware collaboration, augmented manufacturing, and maintenance. The combined studies and research reported in this lecture suggest a number of useful guidelines for designing wearable computing devices. Also included with the guidelines is a list of questions that designers should consider when beginning to design a wearable computer. The research directions section emphasizes remaining challenges and trends in the areas of user interface, modalities of interaction, and wearable cognitive augmentation. Finally, we summarize the most important challenges and outline future directions in wearable computing.