2006's Wearable Computing Advances and Fashions

The annual IEEE Computer Society International Symposium on Wearable Computers is the premier conference in wearable computing, featuring the latest in technical advances and fashions. More than 150 attendees came from 19 countries and both academia and industry. Three themes stood out. First, user interfaces and wearability are still open problems, even after more than a decade of wearable computing research. Second, evaluation continues to be emphasized-testing wearable computing ideas under realistic conditions and solving problems both theoretically and practically. Third, wearable computing isn't just about the form factor and computational capabilities of the devices we wear but also about sensing where we are and what we're doing when we wear them. The conference had sessions on activity recognition, location systems, interface evaluation, input devices and sensors, and wearability.