Wearable Computing – an Approach for Living Labs

Abstract:
A Living Lab refers to a setting created with specific targets and a clear structure, but in the same time dealing with the uncontrollable dynamics of daily life. Wearable computing means a paradigm shift: instead of working at the computer users are supported by computing systems in their primary tasks. Thus wearable computing is ideal to develop new insight into the behaviour of the Living Lab. Currently wearable computing is still a niche technology in the laboratory stage. However, with wearIT@work a project dedicated to wearable applications was launched by the European Commission (EC IP 004216). The first 18 months of this project are completed and demonstrators, evaluations, and results are available. In this paper, the concept of the project is briefly introduced and results are presented showing the impact of wearable computing for the Living Lab. This impact is based on the cyclic and user-centred design approach in developing the different pilot application demonstrators for the four application domains of maintenance, production, healthcare and emergency response.