Pasteables: A Flexible and Smart “Stick-and-Peel” Wearable Platform for Fitness and Athletics

Wearable technologies, such as smartwatches and health monitoring bands, are becoming increasingly popular and transforming our fitness and sports industry. Monitoring health parameters and body activity can help achieve fitness goals, improve sports performance, and aid in physiotherapy. However, state-of-the-art wearable devices are often not flexible (i.e., targeted to a specific use case), expensive, hard to setup, or have privacy concerns. They are designed and optimized for a specific application with tight hardware–software integration, and it is hard or impossible to repurpose them for diverse use cases. In this article, we propose a flexible, reconfigurable human body movement and health monitoring platform, called “Pasteables.” It is a stick-and-peel device (which acts like a band-aid) that attaches to the skin or clothing and can create an on-body network of smart wearables. Given an application, Pasteables can be easily adapted to its requirements while ensuring good performance and privacy. We present the overall architecture, system design steps, and the configuration process. We have designed a set of functional prototypes and configured them for performing a variety of cameraless pose and posture detection tasks, which are important for athletes, professional dancing, physiotherapy, and fitness workouts. We note that the Pasteables can perform pose/posture detection without external stationary reference at low cost and high accuracy.