Wearable Technologies for Helping Human Thermophysiological Comfort

The thermophysiological comfort is one of the aspects of the human comfort. It is related to the thermoregulatory system of the body and its reactions to the temperature of the surrounding air, activity and clothing. The aim of the chapter is to present the state of the art in the wearable technologies for helping the human thermophysiological comfort. The basic processes of body's thermoregulatory system, the role of the hypothalamus, the reactions of the body in hot and cold environment, together with the related injuries, are described. In the second part of the chapter smart and intelligent clothing, textiles and accessories are presented together with wearable devices for body's heating/cooling.

Wearable Internet of Things

With the type of ailments increasing and with the methods of diagnosis improving day by day, wearable devices are increasing in number. Many times, it is found to be beneficial to have continuous diagnosis for certain type of ailments and for certain type of individuals. One will feel uncomfortable if a number of needles are protruding out of one's body for having continuous diagnosis. From this point of view, wearable diagnosis systems are preferable. With Internet of Things (IoT), it is possible to have a number of diagnostic sensors as wearable devices. In addition, for a continuous monitoring, the information from these wearable devices must be transferring information to some central location. IoT makes this possible. IoT brings full range of pervasive connectivity to wearable devices. IoT of wearable devices can include additional intelligence of location of the person wearing the device and also some biometric information identifying the wearer.

Development of a Low-Cost Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display Prototype

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) have been emerging in the last years. These technologies sound like the new hot topic for the next years. Head-Mounted Displays have been developed for many different purposes. Users have the opportunity to enjoy these technologies for entertainment, work tasks, and many other daily activities. Despite the recent release of many AR and VR HMDs, two major problems are hindering the AR HMDs from reaching the mainstream market: the extremely high costs and the user experience issues. In order to minimize these problems, we have developed an AR HMD prototype based on a smartphone and on other low-cost materials. The prototype is capable of running Eye Tracking algorithms, which can be used to improve user interaction and user experience. To assess our AR HMD prototype, we choose a state-of-the-art method for eye center location found in the literature and evaluate its real-time performance in different development boards.

Wearables Operating Systems

Wearable devices have increasingly become popular in recent years. Devices attached to users body remotely monitor his daily activities/health. Although some of these devices are pretty simple, others make use of an operating system to manage memory, resources, tasks, and any user interaction. Some of them were not initially designed and developed for this purpose, having a poor performance requiring the use of more resources or better hardware. This chapter presents a characterization of wearable devices considering the operating systems area. Some constraints of this context were designed to analyze the operating system's execution when inserted into a wearable device. Data presented at the end shows that there is a lack of performance in specific areas, letting to conclude that improvements should be made.

Wearable Antennas

Having the merits of being light-weight, energy efficient, in addition to low manufacturing cost, reduced fabrication complexity, and the availability of inexpensive flexible substrates, flexible and wearable technology is being established as an appealing alternative to the conventional electronics technologies which are based on rigid substrates. This chapter is organized as follow into three major sections. In the first part, a detailed review of wearable antennas including applications and antenna families is presented. The second part of this project deals with the flexible antennas materials and fabrication methods. A wearable antenna prototype for medical applications, more accurately, early breast cancer detection, is discussed in the last section of this chapter.

Wearable Health Care Ubiquitous System for Stroke Monitoring and Alert

Research regarding stroke indicates that ensuring a short elapsed time between accident and treatment can be fundamental to allow saving patient's life and avoid future sequels. This paper describes a model for monitoring and rescuing victims in situations of possible stroke occurrence. It uses stroke symptoms that can be monitored by mobile equipment, ambient intelligence, and artificial neural networks. The model is independent of human operation and applications or third party devices, therefore adding facilities to increase the quality of life for people with stroke sequel, due to constant monitoring and follow-up provided, allowing the stroke patient to consider a recovery period with greater autonomy. A prototype based on free software platforms was developed, to assess the accuracy and the time elapsed between the prototype to detect and to send an alert. The results indicate a positive outcome for the work continuity.

Human Context Detection From Kinetic Energy Harvesting Wearables

Advances in energy harvesting hardware have created an opportunity for realizing self-powered wearables for continuous and pervasive Human Context Detection (HCD). Unfortunately, the power consumption of the continuous context sensing using accelerometer is relatively high compared to the amount of power that can be harvested practically, which limits the usefulness of energy harvesting. This chapter employs and infers HCD directly from the Kinetic Energy Harvesting (KEH) patterns generated from a wearable device that harvests kinetic energy to power itself. This proposal eliminates the need for accelerometer, making HCD practical for self-powered devices. The authors discuss in more details the use of KEH patterns as an energy efficient source of information for five main applications, human activity recognition, step detection, calorie expenditure estimation, hotword detection, and transport mode detection. This confirms the potential sensing capabilities of KEH for a wide range of wearable applications, moving us closer towards self-powered autonomous wearables.

When Wearable Computing Meets Smart Cities

In this chapter, wearables are presented as assistive technology to support persons with disabilities (PwD) to face the urban space in an autonomous and independently way. In the Inclusive Smart City (ISC), everyone has to be able to access visual and audible information that so far are available just for people that can perfectly see and listen. Several concepts and technologies – such as Accessibility and Universal Design, Pervasive Computing, Wearable Computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and Cloud Computing – are associated to achieve this aim. Also, this chapter discusses some examples of use of wearables in the context of Smart Cities, states the importance of these devices to the successful implementation of Inclusive Smart Cities, as well as presenting challenges and future research opportunities in the field of wearables in ISC.