Designing wearables with people in mind

Abstract

Wearable computing devices enter into different areas of our life. Among others, the most prominent themes are bio-tech fusion, synced lifestyle, organic computing, human enhancement, health empowerment, and learning. Design of wearables implies the tangible, wearable, and sometimes ubiquitous interfaces, as for input as well as the output of a data. The screen-based laws, rules, and guidelines often have nothing to do with such nonstandard types of human-computer interfaces. The nature of user interfaces for wearables is versatile and different from the traditional, screen-based human-computer interfaces. For designing wearables, it is not enough to apply the usability rules. The wearable devices are worn on a body, and that is the main distinction from screen-based devices. People have different sizes of clothes, mental and physical abilities, and social and cultural background. These properties start to play an important role in interaction design for wearable computing. In this paper, we review a hierarchical model for Universal Design principles thatwe propose to use for evaluation of prototypes of the wearable devices. We describe different groups of the Universal Design principles and propose a combined tool for use in the evaluation of the design of prototypes for the wearables.