It is almost Thanksgiving time, it is hard to believe. I have always wondered whether how we feel about time is more recent, due to the influence of technology in our lives and not having a pause button. I just completed three years at Wellesley and it has gone by so fast. This year, for our Thanksgiving, we will have a few additional guests and we are so looking forward to next week. Since Thanksgiving is a family “reunion”, I wanted to share with you an excellent, emotional video from Google about the reunion of two old friends who were separated due to the partition of India in 1947.

Apparently, the next big wave in technology is “Wearable Computing“. The hype really has picked up primarily due to increased use of Google Glass. The real question is how many of us are ready to wear computing? I highly recommend an excellent conversation on this subject by Bryan Alexander and Veronica Diaz from EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) which touches on many interesting areas around wearable computing devices.

A chapter on “Wearable Computing”  by Steve Mann in “The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed.” should give you a reasonable background on this subject. We “wear” (such as digital wrist watches or bluetooth earphones)  or carry computing devices (mobile phones, laptops etc) all the time, but one way to distinguish the wearable computing is, as per Mann, “the goal of wearable computing is to position or contextualize the computer in such a way that the human and computer are inextricably intertwined, so as to achieve Humanistic Intelligence”. The difference is subtle.

One of the major distinguishing features is the convenience. When you wear a Google glass and utter the words “Take a picture”, it is far more convenient than picking up your phone, turning it on, clicking on the app and clicking a picture. Several seconds go by. I know, I know… You say “who cares”. But remember how we fell in love with the digital cameras which were far more convenient than the analog ones? Now we are in love with the mobile phones as cameras simply because of the convenience. The Glass can also record videos or better yet, broadcast live what you are seeing. Of course, it can do a lot more! Can all these be done through existing devices? Sure, but remember, it is the convenience we are talking about.

The use of wearable devices to monitor health have been there for a while, but they are becoming inextricably intertwined with the human. Activity tracking or health monitoring  can be done fairly easily and the information can then be shared with your health care provider. The doc can use it as a lie detector test to determine how you have been inflating your exercise regimen. Or, for patients with serious illnesses, help can be dispatched in a timely fashion.

One could find many interesting applications in education space. In Archaeology research they can be of tremendous help in data collection, global positioning and associated annotations. Brain research including Brain activity mapping can use wearables to collect enormous amount of data for research. As a first step, there is a wearable PET scanner that is being used in research. Many areas of scientific research involving human subjects where passive data collection is the goal would tremendously benefit from the wearables. Here is an example of an artist creating artwork that when viewed with a Google Glass unlocks underlying images and videos to convey the artist’s vision, which presumably will result in more such art. Or perhaps new electronic art will be created through wearable devices!

I can go on with other examples, but I will stop after one more – clothing with embedded computing devices. Hexoskin is one such example which measures many metrics about your body and transmits the data to the cloud for you to access and use it to improve your health. I vividly remember a fascinating idea that was floated in the late nineties during the dotcom boom, a reference to which I can no longer find. The basic idea is to create a shirt that will be built with a library of biological molecules that will make the clothing stain resistant. Well, one really doesn’t need biological molecules for this, right? But the idea was to make them “learn” about new stains and adopt accordingly. As and when new stains come along, the library will be enriched for future clothing or the existing library of molecules will be “taught” how to defend by sending information to them via wireless. Another great idea that was thwarted by the lobbyists for laundry detergent and clorox!

There is a perception that these devices violate privacy and security in ways not seen until now. One could argue that it is no worse than what could be done with mobile phones now. In other words, today, I could easily record a conversation on a mobile phone intentionally or accidentally (butt press!) or be recording a video while walking. The only difference is that it is not as convenient. Google Glass like devices do signal through a light when the actual recording takes place, so at least it is obvious and if you don’t like it, you can do something about it. The other argument is that anything and everything that is captured through the wearable devices have to be in the cloud and therefore the chances for compromise to the data is greater. Is it any worse than your mobile devices?

The perception will turn around when some of these concerns are adequately addressed and when there is a threshold of early adopters pave the way and more importantly, when they become more affordable. In the meantime, watch me carefully! I may be wearing computing 🙂