A Cloud You Can Wear: Towards a Mobile and Wearable Personal Cloud

Mobile and wearable devices provide the expected user experience and the ability to run complex applications using cloud based services. This makes the design of such wearable devices complex, expensive, and with major data privacy concerns. In this paper, we present the concept of a wearable cloud -- a complete yet compact and lightweight cloud which can be embedded into the clothing of a user. The wearable cloud makes the design of mobile and wearable devices simple, inexpensive, and lightweight, tapping into the resources of the wearable cloud. We introduce five wearable cloud service delivery models including a prototype implementation of the wearable cloud and a cheap touchscreen terminal device. The paper presents experimental results on the usability of the wearable cloud based on energy consumption and application performance.