Wear-I: A New Paradigm in Wearable Computing (Invited Paper)

Nowadays there are already a multitude of various wearable devices, and more wearables are expected to come onto the market in the next few years. Much of the current research in wearable computing has fallen into two basic categories, device-centered and application-centered, which are however dedicated to specific applications, and without the flexibility and scalability sufficient to support more applications by reusing and coordinating all devices worn by a user. This paper presents a new wearable computing paradigm called Wear-I that regards wearables as extensions of human sense and action organs, and further proposes a life-like system to interconnect, manage and control these wearables using various applications. Wear-I's concepts, characteristics, constituents, architecture and model, as well as its technical issues and challenges are described in this paper.