Wearable Technology
A close look at the current state and the future of wearable technology
What is wearable technology?
Technology that functions when worn on the body, acting as an extension of oneself can be considered wearable technology.
When discussing wearable technologies, the first examples that come to mind are smartwatches and fitness bands. This current concept is now changing as the ever-increasing pace of the development of technology is enabling the use of wearable technology in more innovative ways.
What can the state of the art wearables do?
Healthcare:
Currently, people are becoming accustomed to using fitness bands to monitor their health. This might take a new shape of being a band or patch that sticks to your skin and stays hidden if you so wish. The fitness tracking system could be included in your clothes as well.
Biosensors: A research published in January 2017 on biosensors might pave the way for us to use biosensors on wearables that can stick onto our body and provide a range of information about our health condition. The sensors should allow frequent and continuous measurements of body functions (physiology), including heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen levels, and physical activity [1]. This information can then be used to diagnose health issues or have a pre-emptive strike on health problems before they even originate. Philips had introduced the idea a year before and now it is gradually becoming a reality. It is expected to be in use in the near future.
At present, Reply Ltd. offers a telemedicine solution called Ticuro Reply that combines IoT and wireless medical devices that continuously monitor a patient’s vitals and behaviour. This involves the usage of over 50 integrated wearable devices such as bands and socks. The system is smart and securely connects a patient to their doctor whenever their vitals are critical.
Hearables: A new type of earbuds which are being referred to as “hearables” are now available. These are smart wireless earbuds that put AI assistants like Siri and Google Now right inside your ears. These devices can operate independently of phones and come with onboard storage as well. They may additionally provide fitness and heart rate tracking functionalities on top of this. But, to see details of the data collected you would need to use your phone.
Ultraviolet sensors: On the other hand, a company called Mc10 Inc [2]. is developing UV sensors that sunscreen production companies are including with their sunscreens. It simply stays on the skin and can monitor your exposure to UV rays in real time. The width of this device is less than that of a human hair, so you would barely notice it is even on your skin.
Baby monitors: A few companies are now offering button-like wearables for babies that can monitor sleep position, sleep cycle, motion, heart rate, etc. of babies and can send this data to your smartphone [3]. These can alert you in the case of emergencies as well and serve as effective baby monitors. Albeit expensive, they certainly provide more relevant and important health information than traditional baby monitor systems and could certainly become cheaper and widely used in the near future.
Security:
Wearable devices for the police are enabling them to record crime acts as they happen. The technology works by making use of on-body video cameras that start recording automatically when the police officers take their gun out from their holsters [4].
Sport & Fitness:
It has been about six years since Adidas released the F50 miCoach™ boot which is capable of collecting data and giving some feedback on performance. We have come a long way since then. Now, wearables can provide data for a multitude of sports and fitness activities that include regular exercises but go well beyond that [5].
E-textiles and the future of clothing
A couple of years ago when Google initiated project Jacquard, e-textiles were still in their infancy. They explored the idea of gesture recognition using e-textiles. Currently, many systems are in development and research is being carried out to use e-textiles to allow clothes to do a lot more in the future. These include health monitoring, navigation and aesthetics.
Aesthetics: Wearable technology could also be used to display our emotion. As seen in the image above, a “Spider Dress” powered by Intel Edison is capable of extending out its “legs” to protect the wearer’s personal space by detecting the stress levels of the wearer. The technology is being used for aesthetics in this example but could potentially be used to study psychological behaviour in the future.
Navigation: It might be difficult for us to imagine how clothes could help us navigate. Surprisingly, the technology to enable this has already been introduced by a company called Wearable Experiments. Three years ago, they introduced a jacket to guide tourists through the streets of Paris. If improved and implemented widely in the future, this could be how we take tours on a regular basis.
Fitness: Clothes are now capable of doing the fitness tracking for us. A company called Sensoria has introduced intelligent sportswear that makes use of electrodes embedded in the clothes and a small monitoring device attached to it. Although not fully embedded in the clothing, the system has the vital components separated in a removable enclosure to make the rest of the clothing washable.
I spoke to Dr. Akram Alomainy (Senior Lecturer at the department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, QMUL) & Dr. Rebecca Stewart (Lecturer at the department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, QMUL) to learn about the future of wearables & e-textiles and the current challenges in research in the field.
Dr. Akram Alomainy spoke about a future where more wearable technology would come in the form of e-textiles and one of their central roles would be to serve as health monitoring systems. A lot of companies and researchers are interested in this and that could make this a reality as early as within the next 3 to 5 years.
With the pace of miniaturization of wearable technologies, it is just a matter of time before these systems are embedded into our clothing and become a part of our daily lives.
Dr. Rebecca Stewart has given me insight into new e-textile based technologies which are being developed for space exploration. The aim of these technologies is to develop smart space suits to enable greater flexibility for astronauts among other facilities. Perhaps the general population would also benefit from these endeavours in the future.
Current obstacles
Dr. Alomainy spoke about current obstacles in research in the field which include the accuracy of data collected. As it stands, with increasing accuracy, expenditure increases proportionally. Thus, most consumer wearables today are not very accurate, although higher levels of accuracy can be achieved with more expensive equipment. The good news is that as with every other piece of technology, these would become cheaper over time as well.
Dr. Stewart feels that the challenges she is facing for her research on e-textiles are more mundane. The biggest challenge for her is to produce e-textiles that are not damaged when coming into contact with water. This could perhaps be circumvented by implementing the e-textile features in clothing that are not usually washed. But, this defeats the purpose of making wearables ubiquitous and an integral part of our daily lives as most articles of clothing have to be washed on a regular basis.
Safety benefits and safety risks
Safety benefits: Dr. Stewart mentioned that we could benefit from wearable technology that could be used to increase safety in industries that use robots. Robots or robotic arms could be made aware of the presence humans around them so that they can prevent accidents that involve an unexpected collision between robots and humans.
Safety issues: Both Dr. Alomainy and Dr. Stewart think that we could have safety risks in terms of data leak and our confidential data being accessible by third parties. The fact that your personal healthcare data can be accessible by someone other than your doctor and yourself is concerning. To overcome this issue, personal healthcare data must be kept offline whenever possible. The companies who would bring this technology to the market must refrain from collecting their users’ healthcare data themselves.
Conclusion
Our insatiable curiosity and our thirst for innovation will continue to take us further in the field of wearable technology without a doubt. With so many prospects of crucial applications and widespread adaptation in the near future, we will embrace wearable technologies as an integral part of our lives one way or another.
References:
- Healthcare: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001402
- Mc10: https://www.mc10inc.com
- Baby monitor: https://monbaby.com, http://sproutling.com
- Security: https://www.edesix.com/component/tags/tag/24-vb-300, http://www.vievu.com
- Sport & Fitness: https://piq.com , http://press.ralphlauren.com/polotech, http://www.sensoriafitness.com/
- Spider Dress: https://iq.intel.com/smart-spider-dress-by-dutch-designer-anouk-wipprecht
Acknowledgment:
This article would not have been written without the expert advice and opinions of Dr. Rebecca Stewart & Dr. Akram Alomainy. They have made me aware of many recent technologies, some of which I have discussed in this article. They are both leading researchers and have years of experience in the field of wearable technology.
Dr. Rebecca Stewart: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~rebeccas
Dr. Akram Alomainy: http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~akram
Thanks to my supervisor Francesca Margherita Chifari who has guided me during my research for this article and has provided an incredible amount of support whenever required.
