A system design and build course on wearable computers

With the advent of rapid design methodologies and rapid fabrication technologies, it is possible to construct fully customized systems in a matter of months. Carnegie Mellon's innovative course on Rapid Prototyping of Wearable Computers has developed a new class of computing systems with a small footprint that can be carried or worn by a human and be able to interact with computer-augmented environments. This paper describes and compares several generations of CMU wearable computers for speech recognition. A metric for comparison of wearable computers has been introduced, indicating almost five orders of magnitude improvements in performances of our wearable computer running speech recognition applications.