Keywords

1 Wearable Technologies

Research and development in wearable computing gained increasing attention in past decades thanks to numerous advances in hardware as well as software. Such advances include miniaturized electronic components, more efficient energy sources, improved network connections and data storage solutions, altogether they are responsible to boost the sales of wearable computers in the market and also the number of applications available. In addition to that, development toolkits (such as Lilypad Arduino [23] and Teknikio [43]) and dedicated operating systems (such as Android Wear OS [2] and Samsung Tizen [45]) further incentivized the research and development in the domain, enabling developers and designers to build on off-the-shelf technologies and create customized solutions of hardware and software applications. The increased popularity of wearable technologies not only ensured that users became more familiar and adapted to them, but also made wearables more affordable and accessible to a large range of users [1].

Wearable technologies are versatile thanks to diverse form factors, sensors and actuators that exist. When combined such components extend the opportunities for interactive applications to be built. Regardless of their placement on the human body, wearable technologies are promising to support and to improve the education of students [6] at various levels, in a global scale [38], across disciplines [16], and with long-term benefits [22]. Beyond serving as a performance tool to support stakeholders, wearables hold a tremendous potential to be transformative, adding value to the learning experiences, and serving as incentive to increase students’ motivation and engagement levels [16]. By exploring the hands-free as well as the heads-up solutions [37], wearables are able to re-design the relationship between teaching and learning [10]. In the classroom specifically, wearable technologies can serve as a valuable asset [7].

1.1 Affordances Per Form Factor

Although diverse form factors of wearables exist [26], head-mounted and wrist-worn devices stand out in the research and development of wearable applications. Existing applications are described as follows.

Using head-mounted displays, students can immerse themselves virtually in real-world scenarios and have a full-body experience to learn diverse concepts [29] through a hands-free experience [3]. For instructors, head-mounted displays enable real-time access to feedback information about their teaching performance [48]. Virtual as well as Augmented Reality [3] are useful resources in teaching and learning, being explored to support a number of subjects [48], including surgical education [34]. Diverse types of devices can be used to implement augmented reality solutions in the classroom, including glasses and headgear that enable students to see computer-generated images imprinted on their reality [3]. Examples of immersive scenarios that can help to teach complex concepts range from surgery training [27, 44] to social and communication skills [48]. Headsets can also help with audio contents, passively delivering podcasts and audio books on demand. Head-mounted displays can offer prompt access to information, opportunities for seamless collaboration, training, and a potential for sharing and learning [15].

Wrist-worn devices offer unique opportunities for students, for instance when learning new vocabulary for a course, science [12,13,14, 18], physical education, mathematics [16] or even a new language. Despite smartwatches not supporting advanced renderings of graphic user interfaces when compared to head-mounted displays, these devices are lightweight and blend themselves seamlessly with students’ outfits. They are also continuously available for users to access, enabling students and instructors to receive notifications and access information promptly, unobtrusively, whenever and wherever they go. Fitness trackers specifically can be valuable for users when trying to learn physical activities that require: continuous monitoring of body posture, repetitions counting, prompt feedback about physiological responses and motor skills, and brief instructions. By collecting users’ data these devices help students to connect theoretical concepts to real world activities [16]. Examples of wrist-worn applications include their assessments to support dance classes, swimming, climbing [25], golf and piano lessons [19, 41].

Wearable technologies represent the next frontier in technology integration [7], but despite the growing number of research projects in the domain [39], little is known about how wearables can effectively support students’ learning [18], especially in the long run, when novelty effects are less likely to interfere with the users’ motivations and enthusiasm [16].

1.2 Wearable Applications in Educational Settings

The research and development of wearables in educational settings across disciplines followed the growth of the wearable market in the past years [9], with applications that aim at facilitating teaching for instructors, learning for students or monitoring tasks for practitioners. For Popat and Sharma (2013), wearable computers often perform background tasks, including: providing reminders, collecting data, and retrieving time-sensitive information in support of the user [35].

In teaching activities, smartwatches have been explored for children [13, 18], for instance using gloves to teach piano lessons [19], and glasses to enhance communication [48]. In medical education, wearables have become a widespread trend [21, 36], for instance through the usage of real-time augmented reality to improve surgical education [34].

For monitoring activities [33], attendance [22], behavior, classroom involvement [17] and engagement [7], wearable sensors have been explored to understand and analyze physiological signals and emotional responses from learners in real-time [18], to assess sleep quality, stress levels and mental health, in college students [40] and children [12]. Monitoring has also been investigated as a means to prevent academic cheating using wrist-worn devices [46].

To improve students’ productivity in learning scenarios [7], smartwatch applications notify students about the time they have left for exams and in-class activities [22]. Existing projects also include the evaluation of a reading glove [42] and embodied games for math [4]. For climbing activities, a design space has been defined through user-centric design [25].

Wearable technologies have a promising potential to improve educational experiences [1] and their penetration in the market has been increasing, but in educational settings existing solutions are still limited and remain exploratory. There exists a large room for further development in the domain, and future research should unveil the opportunities and affordances of wearables to improve education [39] and fully exploit the potential of on-body interfaces in teaching and learning contexts.

1.3 Key Benefits

One of the major benefits of wearable technology is its ability to add a new engaging element to the teaching curriculum. For Labes et al. (2015), besides providing access to useful information in a timely, ubiquitous fashion [7], wearable devices can also present information in a context-sensitive and personalized manner [22]. In addition to that, wearables can serve as assistive technologies in classroom settings, for instance to support students with visual impairments [22] or intellectual disabilities [32]. For Zarraonandia et al. (2013), augmented reality systems for feedback can help to support the communication between students and instructors [48]. For Antonioli et al. (2014), despite rare, the existing tools are becoming more user-friendly and accessible. By requiring less programming and technical skills such solutions can become also more attractive to the common educator [3]. According to consumer surveys, the key advantages of wearables include: helping users to exercise (82%), helping parents to keep their children safe (73%), improving personal accountability (69%), and increasing efficiency at home (65%) and at work (63%) [28].

1.4 Major Challenges

Despite the growth in wearable market in general, and in education enhanced by wearable specifically, few examples of wearable applications in actual courses exist [1]. For Bower et al. (2016), the main reason for that is that educators do not identify sufficient pedagogical value to justify the usage of wearables in the classrooms. Besides this, it is also complex for instructors to deploy wearable technologies in their classes [9]. For Antonioli et al. (2014), most instructors do not have the ability to program their own wearable solution and have to rely on pre-made creation tools, which are not so common [3]. For students, the technologies may be too heavy, uncomfortable, embarrassing to wear [3] or difficult to learn [11]. For Alvarez et al. (2016), the wide variety of wearable devices available makes it challenging for educators to decide which technology to introduce into education contexts. They also claim that the potential of wearables in education is not yet well understood, most likely because the technology is relatively new thus research in the domain is still limited [1]. In addition to that, wearables stand on a moving ground, and rapid development of novel technologies challenge educators in properly understanding which technologies can be used in educational settings and how to maximize its benefits for students.

2 Methods

To better understand how wearable technologies have been applied in educational scenarios, in this paper we report the results of a user-centered design mixed-method approach, in which we combine a review of the literature on state-of-the-art solutions of wearables for teaching and learning with a discussion session with undergraduate students. The literature review provides a retrospective analysis of existing work in the domain and the findings from the discussion session with 40 undergraduate students provides prospective opportunities for further implementations. In the literature review we analyzed publications written in English, extracted for two digital libraries: ACM DL and Google Scholar. In the search, we primarily included ‘wearable’ and ‘education’ as keywords. No constraints regarding venue or time of publication were set for selecting the articles for analysis. Mendeley was used to assist the data collection and annotation process.

The results of the study led to a design space for wearable education, encompassing alternative form factors, key beneficiaries, use case scenarios for teaching and learning, and infrastructural solutions. We elicit and discuss system requirements, preferred features and major challenges from the end users’ perspectives. By focusing on a high-level, top-down approach, the design space proposed covers subjects from multiple disciplines matching those to form factors and learning strategies.

In addition to the literature review, to identify the most convenient format to deliver content for students, we inquiry potential end users (undergraduate students) about their expectations in what regards features and form factors for educational wearables. The discussion of the data collected focuses on eliciting requirements for formats, delivery strategy and customization choices. Drawing on prior research on microinteractions [30], wrist-worn wearables are compelling to teach mainly simple concepts, such as new vocabulary, or to guide the positioning of users when trying to execute physical movements as required to play a new instrument [41]. Head-mounted displays on the other hand afford more complex scenarios that require multisensory input and output, as well as exposure to multimedia scenes, including but not limited to medical examinations and troubleshooting engines.

To gather feedback from end users, we collected data in a 1-hour long discussion session in class, retrieving information about students’ experiences with wearable devices, as well as their interest and concerns about novel wearable applications in education. Through an empirical approach, drawing on the expertise of the research team, and the analysis of the findings from the literature review and students’ discussion session, we assess the potential benefits and drawbacks of specific modalities and form factors, and analyze the users’ responses quantitatively and qualitatively to define a set of dimensions, their granularity levels, and guidelines of the design space. Inspired by [31], our design space will inform stakeholders in the decision-making process to apply wearable technologies in their daily practices and to assess novel solutions. Unlike prior work on wearables in education from the perspective of instructors [9], which may be restricted in terms of feasibility constraints and hesitance in technology acceptance, we assessed wearable solution in the light of existing literature and the students’ perspectives.

3 Results

Educational applications leveraging on wearable platforms should empower users to experience multimodal contents across different platforms seamlessly, transitioning from one device to another to access contents as needed (in the wild and on the go). We expect wearable applications in education scenarios to also allow users to customize their learning experiences according to their individual’s needs and preferred modalities, through personalized learning technologies [7]. For Billinghurst and Starner (1999) a wearable computer must satisfy three major goals: (1) be mobile, (2) augment the users’ reality, and (3) be context sensitive [6]. Driven by such principles, we define our design space for wearables in educational settings (Fig. 1) in terms of beneficiaries, infrastructural needs, features, and form factors.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Wearable technologies in educational settings – a design space.

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3.1 Key Beneficiaries

Three main stakeholders benefit from wearables in education:

  • Students: through enhanced learning experiences students are exposed to interactive materials which can improve their education, also by using wearables as support tools, students are more likely to succeed in their executive functions, new technologies also afford personalized and engaging strategies to deliver educational materials, such solutions are expected to enhance knowledge acquisition, retention and application. Students with diverse needs can also benefit from wearables that provide them assistance, augmenting their individual abilities.

  • Instructors: they can become more aware about the students’ performances and engagement levels in real-time in class activities, be it at the individual or collective level; through augmented solutions, instructors are able to enhance their teaching strategies on-the-fly; wearables can also facilitate content delivery, through immersive experiences for training purposes.

  • Experts in education: the continuous data collection from wearables used to instrument students, classrooms, or instructors can help education experts in taking more informed decisions, at an individual or collective level; with the analysis of the data collected experts are empowered to identify patterns and also to draw correlations between students’ performances and specific teaching styles; in addition to that, the evaluation of effectiveness of wearable teaching can assist experts in adopting strategies that can more successfully improve the education system.

3.2 Infrastructural Needs

In what regards technical infrastructure, there are four major components for wearables to support education. They are defined as follows:

  • Form factors: the wearable devices used continuously and in direct contact with end users, with capabilities to sense data from the environment or from each individual, and to provide notifications, reminders and content delivery.

  • Network: most wearables are not stand alone, and still rely on external devices for power, improved storage, and additional capabilities, smartwatches and fitness trackers usually depend on mobile applications to work. Similarly, head-mounted devices when not wired to desktop computers to access applications and retrieve content, also depend on wireless connections (such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) to run. While the connectivity extends the potential of wearable devices, it also drains their battery more quickly and may result in data loss or unstable connections depending on external factors (Bluetooth connections for instance are limited to a 100-meter range).

  • Storage: given their limited dimensions and computational capabilities, wearables per se have reduced memory and thus frequently depend on cloud services (or external devices) to maintain the data that is collected continuously and in long term and to enable information retrieval.

  • Analytics and Visualization: the potential to identify patterns, correlations and trends in the data collected through wearables adds value to the educational experiences, therefore to fully exploit it, wearable applications should have available tools that are dedicated to the exploration of the data collected, facilitating its interpretation and sense-making by stakeholders, be it end users at the individual level, or instructors collectively.

Wearable experiences should be interactive and adaptive allowing students to express themselves freely, to assess their understanding of the subject through the application and to receive contents and feedback that are tailored to their specific needs and profiles. For future avenues, we expect the data collection with wearable sensors to facilitate the identification of individual profiles, improving teaching strategies and enhancing learning outcomes with more personalized solutions.

3.3 Wearable Features

Depending on the functionality implemented in the wearable, the target users, use case scenarios, as well as the sensors available, the wearable applications envisaged in an educational context can serve multiple purposes. From a high-level perspective, werarables serve to collect data from users (be it behavioral data or environmental data), to process and interpreted the data collected, and to deliver reminders, notifications, alerts and feedback for end users. When analyzing prior work in the domain, we note a wide range of applications that have been explored. These applications are detailed in Table 1, including the form factor used, the activity supported, the study population, and subject.

Table 1. An overview of wearable technologies (wrist-worn and head-mounted devices) in educational settings: 8 case studies.
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Instructors’ Perspectives

The literature reports benefits for instructors to receive feedback in real time when teaching [8], including information about how engaged or confused the students are at a given time [48]. For Bower and Sturman (2015), wearables help instructors to record data, to simulate scenarios, to support communication, to increase engagement, to guide users, and to gamify users’ experiences [8]. In terms of non-functional requirements, they highlight the efficiency of the solutions (“faster access to information”), unobtrusive feedback, and context-sensitive information (e.g. depending on the users’ location).

Students’ Perspectives

To complement the analysis from previous literature and gather students’ insights on wearable solutions that would be helpful for them in postsecondary education, we asked 40 undergraduate students about their preferred features. The students who participated in the study follow an Information Technology major. As main features for wearables in educational settings, they mentioned: (1) check-in (attendance taking), (2) monitoring and tracking, (3) access control, (4) notifications and (5) information delivery as the top features of their preference (Table 2). Ten students (out of 40) already owned a wearable device (fitness tracker or smartwatch). All students, except one, proposed features for wrist-worn wearables, likely because of the easier access and popularity of this specific form factor. A glass application was proposed to help with record keeping of the lectures.

Table 2. Preferred features for wearable computers in assisting students’ education.
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3.4 Implementation Challenges

There are several obstacles that challenge the acceptance, adoption and sustained engagement of wearable computers in educational settings in a large scale. Among those, we can highlight that the widespread adoption of wearables raises privacy and security concerns in what regards the students’ data [16]. Also, wearable solutions may rely and depend on outside vendors for storage, retrieval and analysis. Lastly, the costs associated to wearable can limit their access to students depending on socioeconomic status [7], which could contribute to further increase inequality and digital exclusion as well.

From the analysis of the students’ perspectives, we learned that the major concerns they have are: fear of distraction, issues with connectivity and compatibility, problems to learn how to efficiently use the device and application (need for high usability levels in order to ensure acceptance and sustain adoption), fear of high costs to afford the technology, battery issues and privacy concerns.

From the analysis of the literature, we note that there are common concerns when comparing students’ responses and investigators’ perspectives, including the challenges related to affordability [7, 22, 35], technical infrastructure [5, 8, 26], distraction [3, 8, 9], security [10], inequalities, dependence [8], ethics [16] and privacy [7, 9]. For Labus et al. (2015), if wearable devices are used in the process of learning, their interaction must be simple and intuitive, to minimize the cognitive load on learners and allow them to fully focus on main tasks [22]. For Zarraonandia et al. (2017) students fear the constant recording of their actions and may also hesitate to adopt the technology; therefore brief trainings are recommended to reduce students’ anxiety [48]. For Antonioli et al. (2014) hardware as well as software malfunctions can impair the learning experiences of students [3].

Concerns that were exclusively remarked in the scientific literature include: the volatility of the wearable market [48], which can challenge sustained adoption of wearable solutions; need to calibrate the devices for each individual student [3, 16]; data ownership and the access to the data collected, when conducting research studies in scale, since some wearable devices (such as Fitbit) restrict data access in their proprietary software [16]. In addition to that, the continuous data collection also results in large data sets, which can be overwhelming for posterior analysis [16]. Lastly, the process of synchronizing, accessing and converting each individual’s data is not only complicated but also time-consuming [16].

Although privacy concerns have been reported by students and in prior work in the literature, they are more frequent in an adult population, especially among investigators and instructors. Egen et al. (2018) report that the teenaged students who participated in their study were not overly concerned about privacy issues, mostly because of a limited understanding about the privacy risks associated with tracking technologies [16]. Privacy challenges can be exacerbated if the students belong to a vulnerable population –including minors [16] or students with intellectual disabilities [32]– and also when the data collected by wearables is stored in cloud services, which may not comply with laws and governmental policies that protect students’ privacy (e.g. FERPA in the U.S. [47]). Connections from unauthorized parties can also pose additional risks in what regards access to the student’s data and tampered notifications.

4 Final Remarks

Advances in wearable technologies have facilitated access to the devices and enabled more research and development to be conducted in the domain. Despite the growth in the use of wearable devices in recent years [20] and the consensus of promising opportunities across domains, most of the research is still exploratory in an attempt to unveil the hidden opportunities for wearables to improve education. The uptake of wearable technologies in higher education has not yet been fully realized [9], but preliminary findings demonstrate that there is a large potential for wearables to enhance students experience when learning new concepts across disciplines.

A number of questions remain open [10], leading to a research roadmap in wearable learning. These questions involve: (1) the design for a multi-device learning environment; (2) the assessment of the added value of wearable learning in what regards the cost of devices and implementation; and (3) the enhancements in teaching and learning experiences in a sustained manner. The effect of time on students’ motivations and enthusiasm to use wearables in the long run is unclear, since most studies were conducted in short durations. Even though there is a consensus in the community that privacy concerns are important, there are no consolidated solutions available to ensure that students’ have their right to privacy assured, mostly because existing technological solutions are in their infancy, and the privacy risks, threats and implications are still unclear.