Towards a garment OS: supporting application development for smart garments

Abstract

Wearable devices and the development of smart garments emerged into a significant research domain over the last decades. Despite the increasing commercial interest, however, smart garments are almost exclusively developed in academia and the developed systems do not exceed a prototypical level. We argue that the main reason why smart garments cannot be produced on commercially relevant scale today is that they each focus on a specific use case. There is no tool support for application developers and no defined APIs within the software and hardware stack that allows developing useful smart garment applications. In this paper we present our work towards Garment OS, a layered software stack that encapsulates different levels of abstraction. We highlight the design of that system which is based on open web protocols. We present an evaluation with software engineers and derive directions for future work.