Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “W is for Wearables”.

Whether a Smart Watch or Fitness Tracker type our wrists now contain one of the most popular wearbles and the one that can easily be associated with the term “Wearable”.

The field of wearables is expanding with more ways to attach sensors and record data about our daily lives. This typically covers anything that you can wear or attach to your body and in the main interfaces with a mobile to be the central data point, although many devices operate separately and can transmit data themselves.

Here are some of the types of wearables available and what they can contain:

Hats

From baseball caps to hard hats, wearables are being incorporated into hats to display or capture information about the wearer or local environment.

• Display Screens to display messages or logos
• Sensors to monitor heat loss
• Sensors to monitor the local environment
• Beacons to show location of the wearer in working zones
• Knock sensors to detect when a hard hat is knocked against an item

Eyewear

Headsets and Glasses provide visionables that can be worn across the eyes to display information to the user of the device. These typically display information and data in one for of reality from a small computing device within the wearable, mobile device or large fixed computer.

• Virtual Reality
• Augmented Reality
• Mixed Reality
• OLED/LCD Screens

Ears

Typically we have always put things over or just inside our ears to hear things such as headphones and headsets. Bone conducting headphones change this by placing a conductor along side the ear and send the sounds to the inner ear through the bones around the ear. This still allows you to hear the environment around you whilst still listening to a music or a phone call.

Wrists

As mentioned above wrists are the most popular place to use a wearble. Taking the form of a smart watch or fitness tracker

• GPS to provide location
• Sensors to monitor fitness, activity and movement
• Sensors to monitor body stats – heartbeat, temperature, sleep patterns
• Connection to other devices such as mobile phones

Clothing

Electro conductive threads are being woven in to clothing to provide an ability to power small sensors and devices also sewn or attached to the garment.

• Ability to power devices through clothes
• Display Screens to display messages or logos
• Sensors to monitor heat loss
• Sensors to monitor the local environment
• GPS to provide location
• Sensors to monitor fitness and movement
• Energy harvesting to power devices

Shoes

Smart Shoes can provide power to devices though energy harvesting devices and use sensors providing tracking of movement.

• Energy harvesting to power devices
• Sensors to monitor fitness and movement

The growth in the wearable market and personal data is vast and will bring changes in the way we use and think about wearables. With wearables collecting data about our activities, industries and businesses are looking at how they can use these. For example:

• Healthcare – monitoring patients through wearables and help gather data for diagnosis
• Fitness – to help maintain our level of fitness and tell us when we are doing well against set goals
• Insurance – using wearbles as a method to bring down insurance premiums of health and life insurance depending on how active you are

Further Reading

• A-Z of Digital – F is for Fitness Trackers
• A-Z of Digital – G is for Geolocation
• A-Z of Digital – H is for Hearable
• A-Z of Digital – J is for Jacking
• A-Z of Digital – L is for Legal
• A-Z of Digital – V is for Visionables

Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “J is for Jacking”.

Jacking is a term used when you plug into something. Body Jacking is a growing area where the body is being used from generating power through movement to implanting chips to interact with the environment such as open a door or unlock a computer.

Previously the main development area for jackables has been in the medical industries with things like robotic limbs, artificial organs, pacemakers and implanted hearing aids. The market is now shifting with recent examples of this include someone who had lost their eye replacing an eye with camera to create films of what they see to employees being implanted with chips to open doors and use the vending machines. There are also Bioables which collect data on your body such as glucose levels using sensors that penetrate into the under the skin.

Whilst there are some medical and ethical questions to be looked at around the growing use of Jacking, the evolving market for non medical use (ie chips implanted under the skin) is starting to create a demand that will trigger these debates.

Being implanted with a chip under the skin may not be for everyone, this is a growing area where it may become part of an induction to a new company on your first day.

There are no clear standards at the moment and chips can use a number of technologies such as NFC or RFID to operate the surrounding environment. Consideration should be give to those that do not want to be implanted or contractors who may not want lots of chips in their bodies.

There have been a number of demonstrations around the insertion of the chips. In some instances professional tattoo artists are used to insert the chips as they have a level of training around injecting the skin. What has yet to be seen is the removal of the chip should someone leave a company or it needs replacing for some reason.