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Human Dynamics Group

What's a Wearable?

To date, personal computers have not lived up to their name. Most machines sit on the desk and interact with their owners for only a small fraction of the day. Smaller and faster notebook computers have made mobility less of an issue, but the same staid user paradigm persists. Wearable computing hopes to shatter this myth of how a computer should be used. A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives.

News:

October 2005

  • Michael Sung successfully defended his doctorate work on "Non-Invasive Wearable Sensing Systems for Continuous Health Monitoring and Long-Term Behavior Modeling"

  • Mark Blum from ETH finished his master's thesis work on "LifeWear" after six months at lab. He has successfully demonstrated a wearable using two accelerometers and microphone that is capable of classifying the wearer's state and context along dimensions including "Location, Posture, Speech, and Event".

September 2005

July 2005

June 2005

  • Will wearable sensing technologies soon allow your cell phone to predict your emotions? Here's a recent Boston Globe article describing our research collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital that attempts to do just that. You can check out the LiveNet Project for more information on wearable healthcare applications.

April 2005

  • Nathan Eagle will be defending on April 25 at 11:00am. Check out his Reality Mining project, and sign up to participate in his study. All you need is a Bluetooth phone.

  • Planning is underway for the Seamless runway fashion show, which will be held at the Media Lab on May 20. Participants from MIT, Harvard, RISD, and Parsons will be showing off their latest wearable designs.

  • Pets deserve wearables, too! Check out the Engadget and Wired articles on SNiF: Social Networking In Fur. The original paper along with photos and videos can be found on Noah Fields' site.

December 2004

  • We are in the process of updating the MIThril web site. The original version will stick around until we migrate the information into our new format.

  • The planning of Hackfest 2005 is underway, and we would like hear from you if you are interested in participating. Email us at hackfest2005@media.mit.edu and check out the hackfest2005 updates on the events page.

October 2003

  • ISWC 2003 was a great success -- MIT had a strong showing, and the overall quality of the program was quite good. The Memory Glasses paper has gotten a lot of attention, which you can download here. We are now in the process of doing some long-overdue updates to the web site, so please be patient.

  • The main MIThril web site is still woefully out of date, but we have a new publication out that covers some recent developments: MIThril 2003: Applications and Architecture, to be published in ISWC2003

  • Most new information is now in our borglab wiki, including newer hardware documentation, and our MIThril 2003 work that focuses on the Sharp Zaurus.

  • The Squirt 2 (crystal tag) document package is available from the MIThril hardware page.

  • The USB-enabled (USB 1.1) MIThril junction document package is available from the MIThril hardware page.

  • A substantial amount of high-level documentation has been added to our CVS repository, which should make it considerably more useful.

  • The MIThril wiki has lots of new material, especially on the MIThril Construction topic.