Promoting wearable computing: a survey and future agenda

Abstract

This paper is composed of a survey on wearable computers and a research agenda to further pursue topics in the communication area. We begin with a brief walk-through of the terminology and examples, fol lowed by motivation originated from two historical trends – enhancing hu man biological ability and increasing resource accessibility. Then, we inves tigate the existing technologies and relevant research proposals in four ma jor areas: I/O interface, searching, communication, and power. After ad dressing some concerns on wearable computer’s practicality, we proposed a number of small-scale projects aiming at developing high-level communi cation protocols suitable for the wearable computing environment.