Wearable Computing : Present

and Future
Business case
• In 2013, investors poured $458 million into 49
wearable company deals ( CB Insights )

• $52 Billion Industry by 2020 ( Credit Suisse )

• Major tech companies like Apple, Google,

Samsung and Intel investing heavily in
wearables, with non-tech giants like Nike,
Under Armour, Adidas, Fossil, Timex etc.
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Popularity Example

• Pebble

• Kickstarter Campaign

• Seeks : $100K
• Raises : $10+ Million

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Factors in Wearable Tech Today

• Faster and Cheaper Hardware

• Cloud Storage
• Location Data
• Quantified Self Activity
• Gaming Industry
• Visual & Voice Technology
• User Experience

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State-of-the-art

• Devices

• Inputs

• Applications

• Algorithms

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Devices
Google Glass (Smart Glasses)

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Jawbone (Activity Monitor)

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Fitbit (Fitness Tracker)

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Pebble (Smart Wrist Watch)

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Muse (Brain Monitor)

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OmSignal (Smart Shirt)

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FootLogger (Shoe Sole for Fitness
Tracking)

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Mimo (Baby Status Monitoring)

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MC10 (Flexible wearable sensors for
health monitoring)

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Myo (Muscle Activity Tracker)

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Oura (Smart Ring)

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Scanadu (Health – heart rate –
ECG – Blood Pressure etc.
Checker)

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New Wearables – New
Applications

• Wearable Device for Visualizing Knee

Rehabilitation Exercises (CHI 2013)

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And Many More ……
Classification of Wearable
Devices (Function Wise)
• Life Logger
• Gesture Recognizers
• Entertainer
– Video
– Gaming
• Assistant
– For Chore Jobs
– For Creative Jobs
– For Emergency Jobs
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Classification of Wearable
Devices (Creation Wise)

• Replacing Daily Wearables with Smarter

Alternatives
– Watches, Shirts, Shoes, Socks etc.

• Creating New Wearables

– Armband, Headband, Shirt Clippers etc.

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Inputs
Ambient Sensors

• Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer,

Barometer, Thermometer, Relative Humidity
Sensor, Light Sensor etc.

Accelerometer Gyroscope

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Physical Activity Sensor

• MC10 Sensor, EEG sensor etc.

Interaxon Muse EEG MC10 Sensor

reader

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Traditional Inputs/Capture

• Audio(microphone), Video, Photos (camera –

head mounted/ body-attached/ smartphone)
...
• Wi-Fi, Cellular, GPS …

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Applications
Life Logging (Augmented
Memory)

• Google Glass
• Narrative Clip Syncing with cloud
• Getting summary from the video or audio or
images – an important problem !!
• Automatic diary creation for the users or
taking notes for the forgetful users is
important.

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Activity Tracking/Monitoring
• Calorie Used (Wireless Health ‘13 paper used
to guess correctly with accelerometer)
• Sleep Pattern
• Steps walked
• Detecting Eye Contact using Wearable Eye-
Tracking Glasses
• Wearable Activity Recognition for Dogs!!

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Healthcare

• Monitors different vitals of users and help

them to take informed decisions.
• Emergency Patient observation and
immediate healthcare notification.

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Gesture Recognizing
• Free from Gesture used for authentication
(MobiSys 2014 – MPI,Rutgers)
• Identifying Emotions Expressed by Mobile
Users through 2D Surface and 3D Motion
Gestures (UbiComp 2012)
• Unobtrusively Wearable Sensor Suite for
Inferring the Onset, Causality, and
Consequences of Stress in the Field (Sensys
2013)
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Assistant
• Anywhere, Anytime Information and
Communication
• Sensor-Assisted Facial Recognition: An
Enhanced Bio-metric Authentication System
for Smartphones (MobiSys 2014) [Trick :
Relative Position estimation using sensors]
• Navigation using multimodal sensors
(NaviComf, PerCom 2012)
• A Smartphone-Based Obstacle Detection and Classification
System for Assisting Visually Impaired People (CVF, ICCV 2013)
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Assistant to the special people
• Geometric Layout Analysis in a Wearable Reading Device for
the Blind and Visually Impaired (MobiCase 13)
• Parent-Driven Wearable Cameras for Autism Support,
CMU, UbiComp poster

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Augmented Reality

• Google Glass like view which adds layer of

virtual view to normal view.
• After integrating gesture recognition and voice
commands, augmented reality can impact
retail industry, social networks, and gaming
industry.

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Algorithms
General Flow

• Feature Selection and Extraction (PCA etc.)

• Noise removal and Smoothing (Local
Averaging, DTW etc.)
• Peak Detection and Filtering (Butterfly
Filtering etc.)
• Unsupervised (K-Means, EM Maximization
etc.) and Supervised (SVM, LDA etc.)

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Needs Better Sampling Algorithms

• How much to sample ? When ? What is the

accuracy needed ?
• Should it be application based or activity
based ?

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Interesting Marriages
Wearable Computing and
Smartphone
• Most Common and Obvious
• Hub, Connector, and Storage
• Bluetooth, Wi-Fi Direct, NFC ( Audio NFC (Dhawni,
SIGCOMM ‘13) & Visible Light (Hotnets 2013) !! )

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Wearable Computing and
Smart Home/ IoT

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Wearable Computing and
Gaming

• Facebook buys Oculus Rift to give user a

virtual social gaming experience …
• Microsoft buys Osterhout Design Group in San
Francisco, which creates virtual gaming
environments.
• Wearable computing can make a daily skype
or phone call a direct virtual interaction
experience !!

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Wearable Computing and
Search

• Google Acquires Nest

• Physical Graph - Web Graph – Knowledge
Graph
• Better and personalized results
• Closer to the actual Information Need

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Multiple Wearables in sync
MIThrill (MIT Media Lab)

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Sixth Sense ( An Old One ?)

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Oculus Rift and Myo

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Concerns
Privacy

• Expectation and Purpose: Understanding

Users’ Mental Models of Mobile App Privacy
through Crowdsourcing (Privacy depends on
Context, UbiComp 2012)
• Give whole level characteristics to the service
provider not each user level specific
information.

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Security

• Wearable Device can be hacked and attacked

wirelessly. Patients may die.
• Spoofing and altering are dangerous
phenomena which can actually derail the
whole purpose. May create panic.
• Side channel attack through power trace
analysis is possible.

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Energy
• Less is More: Energy-Efficient Mobile Sensing
with SenseLess (MobiHeld 2012)
• Power Constrained Sensor Sample Selection
for Improved Form Factor and Lifetime in
Localized BANs (Wireless Health 2012)
• Power will come from human body energy !!
(Thad Starner, IBM Systems Journal)
• Energy-Efficient Continuous Activity Recognition on
Mobile Phones ( Your Activity will define Model
(Energy <->Classification), ISWC 2012)
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Intrusion

• Too much personalization or assistance will

repel users
• Users will be overwhelmed by the huge
amount of data and can easily be panicked by
misinterpreting any vital health data
• May curb creativity and reduce recall rate

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New Ideas
Automatic Text Tagging with
Emotions (Google Glass +
Muse + Jawbone)

• Each story can be automatically tagged with

emotions by tracking the eye movement,
sounds, activity etc.
• User can easily search according to his mood
or can be automatically given reading
suggestions of a particular position of a book
depending upon his mood !!

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AutoRemember : A Google for Daily
Things (Tile + Google Glass +
Smartphone)
• We forget. We can’t find important docs
when we need
• Can we use our mobile, our sensors, google
glass, rfids, tiles or qr codes to automatically
keeping track of our things?
• This system will also automatically categorize
the things for us; sometimes also
opportunistically scan some docs to store
these in cloud for ubiquitous access.
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 MindDoctor : Body Language Detection -
Mood Inference - Mental health Suggestion
• By intelligently and energy efficiently sensing our
activities and context, a system can easily infer
our mood and can set the color & background
music of my smart home accordingly.
• The system can suggest some exercises like deep
breathing when we are really tensed.
• The system can also detect our body language or
postures, and make suggestions according to
context – like be confident when in meeting.
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What is Next …
Edible Computers

• "I expect to see edible computers pills, which

will act like little medical monitors,
downloading information about your state of
health to a computer you wear.“
– Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, 1999

• Motorola Password Pills & Tatoos ..

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Planting Computers
(Transhumanism?)

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