This chapter presents a set of scenarios involving the GoPro wearable Point of View (PoV) camera. The scenarios are meant to stimulate discussion about acceptable usage contexts with a focus on security and privacy. The chapter provides a wide array of examples of how overt wearable technologies are perceived and how they might/might not be welcomed into society. While the scenario is based at the University of Wollongong campus in Australia, the main implications derived from the fictitious events are useful in drawing out the predicted pros and cons of the technology. The scenarios are interpreted and the main thematic issues are drawn out and discussed. An in depth analysis takes place around the social implications, the moral and ethical problems associated with such technology, and possible future developments with respect to wearable devices.

Today's healthcare technology provides promising solutions to cater to the needs of patients. The development of wearable physiological monitoring system has reached home-centric patients by ensuring faster healthcare services. The primary advantage of this system is activation of alarms to alert the specialist in a nearby hospital to attend to any sort of emergency. Specifically, cardiac-related problems need special attention when a 24-hour Holter monitors ECG signals and identifies the level of abnormalities under various circumstances. Although several brands of Holters exist in market, there is a huge demand for digitized Holter recorders. These recorders can simultaneously analyse cardiac signals in real time mode and store the data and reuse them for next 24 hours. As home-centric based wearable cardiac monitoring system gains much attention recently, there is a need to design and develop a cardiac monitoring system by establishing a trade-off between the required clinical diagnostic quality and cost. This research study highlights a comprehensive survey of various cardiac monitoring systems under wire, wireless and wearable modes. This provides an insight into the need of the hour in bringing a cost-effective wearable system. The study provides an insight of the technological aspects of the existing cardiac monitoring system and suggests a viable design suitable for developing countries.

Health and fitness wearable technology has been around for about 45 years. The most common wearables initially included heart rate monitors, pedometers, and GPS systems. While most of these were initially available as stand-alone devices, many are now available in combination devices such as fitness trackers and smart watches. Health and fitness wearables are used in a wide variety of situations including sports, athletics, personal health, fitness, education, and medical settings. A brief history of each wearable is provided, basic functions are explained, selected research is presented, and potential future developments are discussed. Some information is provided regarding current models and features.

Portable electronic systems and wearable sensor networks are offering increasing opportunities in fields like healthcare, medicine, sport, human-machine interfacing and data sharing. The technological research is looking for innovative design solutions able to improve performances and portability of wearable systems. The power supply strategy is crucial to improve lifetime, reduce maintenance, preserve the environment and reduce costs of smart distributed electronic systems applied to the body. The conversion of biomechanical energy of limbs and joints to electricity has the potential to solve much of the actual limitations. The design and building of wearable energy harvesters for wearable applications require different approaches respect to traditional vibratory energy harvesters. This chapter focuses on transduction materials, modeling strategies, experimental setups, and data analysis for the design of biomechanical energy harvesters; a case study based on system integration and miniaturization is also described for applications in the field of human-machines interfacing.

In this chapter, the authors propose an approach to indoor human daily activity recognition that combines motion data and location information. One inertial sensor is worn on the thigh of a human subject to provide motion data while a motion capture system is used to record the human location information. Such a combination has the advantage of significantly reducing the obtrusiveness to the human subject at a moderate cost of vision processing, while maintaining a high accuracy of recognition. The approach has two phases. First, a two-step algorithm is proposed to recognize the activity based on motion data only. In the coarse-grained classification, two neural networks are used to classify the basic activities. In the fine-grained classification, the sequence of activities is modeled by a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to consider the sequential constraints. The modified short-time Viterbi algorithm is used for real-time daily activity recognition. Second, to fuse the motion data with the location information, Bayes' theorem is used to refine the activities recognized from the motion data. The authors conduct experiments in a mock apartment, and the obtained results prove the effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithms.

Personalized and pervasive healthcare devices help seamlessly integrate healthcare and wellness into the daily life, independent of time and space. Silicon Integrated Circuit (IC) has been used in many advanced healthcare applications due to the compact size and ultra-low power consumption. Meanwhile, printed electronics (PE) is considered as a promising approach enabling cost-effective manufacturing of thin, flexible, and light-weight devices. A hybrid integration of IC and PE provides a new solution for the future wearable healthcare devices. In this chapter, firstly a customized bio-sensing IC is demonstrated, which can detect and process various bio-signals; secondly, the feasibility and performance of using inkjet printing technology as enabling technology has been examined for the fabrication of flexible bio-sensing devices. Finally, a wearable and flexible Bio-Patch is presented by leveraging hybrid integration of PE and bio-sensing IC. In-vivo test results show that the flexible Bio-Patch provides high quality ECG signal comparable with the one gained by bedside ECG machine.

Wearable computers include a variety of body-borne sensory, communication, and computational components that may be worn on the body, under, over, or within clothing. These mechanisms have potential benefits for (a) human performance support, (b) cognitive and psychomotor learning, and (c) K-12 educational environments. This chapter begins with a historical overview of wearable computers and then provides the reader with a current and future perspective of their use across a variety of educational environments.

There is no doubt that the form factor of devices continues to shrink as evidenced by smartphones and most recently smartwatches. The adoption rate of small computing devices is staggering and needs stronger attention from the cybersecurity and digital forensics communities. In this chapter, we dissect smartwatches. We first present a historical roadmap of smartwatches. We then explore the smartwatch marketplace and outline existing smartwatch hardware, operating systems and software. Next we elaborate on the uses of smartwatches and then discuss the security and forensic implications of smartwatches by reviewing the relevant literature. Lastly, we outline future research directions in smartwatch security and forensics.

Wearable Technologies represent an emerging theme. Probably the next emerging market where companies will focus. These devices are replacing entire categories of electronic objects in everyday life and affect the way we live, work and socialize. Among the many applications available, the author limits attention to the field of the smart video cameras. This chapter examines some of the most interesting applications of wearable cameras, with special reference to the Italian situation. In particular, the text traces a summary of the main applications in sports, spying, police, army, education, health, disabilities, and lifelogging. A part is devoted to “wearable extensions” and the concept of augmented reality.

Orientation and mobility are two fields of applications of the so-called Assistive Products, in which we can find a high growth in the last ten years. In this group, the so-called Electronic Travel Aids have a capital importance. These applications are focused on helping blind people in the following aspects of their daily lives, among others: avoiding crashing against obstacles, guiding through unknown environments, giving relevant information of the environment, helping blind people “see” by touch devices, electrodes, sounds, etc. Commercial, but also experimental technology has been intensely applied in this field to provide assistive products, which helps in ways that were unexpected some years ago. The authors provide an introduction to this field and a taxonomy of the available assistive products for the orientation and mobility. Finally, they detail advantages and disadvantages of several paradigmatic proposals to provide a global point of view of the state of the art in orientation and mobility technology for this group of users.