When wearable technology meets computing in future networks: a road ahead

Abstract

Rapid technology advancement, economic growth, and industrialization have paved the way for developing a new niche of small body-worn personal devices, gathered together under a wearable-technology title. The triggers stimulated by end-users interest have introduced the first generation of mass-consumer wearables in just the past decade. Evidently, the trailblazing ones were not designed with strict energy-consumption restrictions in mind. Thus, wearable-computing-related research remained fragmented. Advanced and sophisticated batteries and communication technologies could be already procurable on devices. Additional solutions for efficient utilization of processing power are still a white spot on the wearable technology roadmap. A-WEAR EU project aims to enhance the understanding of how the superimposition of those technologies would improve wearable devices' energy efficiency, with the research area being far from saturation. We foresee enormous room for research as the Edge computing paradigm is emerging towards hand-held devices.