Small Wearable Internet

A diverse set of wearable technologies has become readily available to the community over the past few years. To current standards, wearable devices incorporate high-performance electronics that have been miniaturized so that they’re relatively unobtrusive when worn on the human body. Typical forms include wrist watches; headworn displays, and devices integrated into jewelry. In some cases, though, the electronics have been integrated directly into the fabric of clothing. One exciting capability of these devices is the powerful set of miniaturized sensors that are able to capture information — through accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and sounds — so that we can understand more about a user’s movements and his or her surrounding environment. The potential uses of this capability are great, but they come with ongoing research challenges that must be addressed to reveal the true possibilities. Understanding and characterizing the patterns has applications within the healthcare domain, particularly as more fine-grained activities can be reliably recognized and employed to support patient monitoring. Advancing the algorithms to capture information from wearables’ sensing capabilities has been an ongoing theme among research communities, and the ability to recognize activities — |although not a new concept — still requires effort to uncover its potential. This issue discusses activity recognition challenges and methods specific to the healthcare domain.