An Investigation into the Smart Watch Interface and the User Driven Data Requirements for its Applications

With the introduction of smart watches and their recent commercial success evident with the Samsung Galaxy Gear and the Pebble Smart Watch, the question has been posed as to whether these devices can be implemented successfully in the modern digital world in the long term and provide their users with useful and viable solutions to everyday tasks using enhanced human-computer interaction (Bieber et al., 2013). Smart watches which were available previously on the market offered a limited number of applications at the discretion of manufacturers with no intention of taking advantage of any open source software solutions (Smith, 2013). With the standardisation of an application programming interface and the increasing availability of libraries through software development kits for such devices, new applications can be created more quickly by developers and are able to meet the needs of users more dynamically; penetrating the market faster than in the past (Sachse, 2010). There are already a number of 2 applications available for smart watches; however there has yet to be an investigation into the need to use such a device over already established mobile platforms and what data the users of such devices would want, especially in situations where mobile phones could be difficult or inconvenient to access (Chyla, 2013). The device which will be used in the current study is the Pebble Smart Watch 1 , which offers users an interface to a connected Android or iOS device through Bluetooth radio technology. The Pebble is powered by an ARM Cortex-M3 processor and runs its own Pebble operating system, which is a customized version of FreeRTOS 2. It differs from its competitors, the Sam-sung Galaxy Gear 3 and Sony SmartWatch2 4 , in that it is not a stand-alone device and requires a pairing with a mobile phone within its Bluetooth range (Bieber et al., 2012). The Pebble was selected for this study on the basis of its simplicity and minimalistic e-paper display. This study aims to investigate the data with which university students deem to be useful, this will be conducted by means of a survey. The differences between how that data is accessed and generated on applications on other mobile platforms such as smart phones will also be analysed. Once it is known what data is wanted by this subset of smart watch users, a set of applications will be developed as a proof of concept based on the data …