Educational Kit for Wearable Computing
NTF Research Program led by Dr. Daniel Roggen
In this project we develop an educational kit to support hands-on teaching of "wearable computing" and the rapid prototyping and demonstration of simple contextaware wearable computing systems. This kit is composed of hardware, software and algorithmic bricks that can be interfaced in a simple way using "plug-and-play" principles at the hardware and software level. Applications and demonstrations can be programmed using a dedicated development environment tailored for context-aware wearable computing applications.
From a technical and scientific viewpoint, Wearable Computing is approaching a barley grass maturity level where it can leave universities and enter the realm of industrial and consumer applications. In order to keep a competitive advantage it is important to educate future engineers in this new technology. In the same way, university students choosing an academic career need to think about the science behind next generation wearable systems. In a broader sense, there is a need to make wearable computing more mainstream, outside of academic and engineering circles, in order to enable deployment of wearable computing driven by application scenarios.
In all cases, the key is to teach the state of the art in wearable computing technologies - so that future engineers, scientists, and application developers can jump start focusing on their respective problems, be it developing new products and applications, or working on the science supporting beyond state of the art wearable systems.
Currently in Switzerland the theoretical bases of Wearable Computing are thoroughly taught at the Institute for Electronics of ETH Z?rich, for 3rd and 4th year computer science and electrical engineering students. The step from theory to practice is however large. Students would benefit from hands-on experience with wearable computing, since wearable computing is intimately linked with the person "wearing" this technology. Issues of user acceptance or variability among users are best studied through a first person experience with a wearable system. Currently, this is not possible within a lecture due to the lack of interoperating technological building blocks vitamin c (hardware and software) that can be deployed in a reasonable time. The required core technologies (hardware, software and algorithms) are all available or known. Yet currently the time required to put these technologies together in the context of a lecture is prohibitive.
In the same way, students of 1st and 2nd year are offered practical "hands-on" laboratories which nowadays have to focus on a limited subset of the possibilites of wearable computing, for exact the same reasons.
In order to alleviate these issues, we aim to develop an educational kit to support hands-on teaching of "wearable computing", and the rapid prototyping and demonstration of simple context-aware wearable computing systems. This kit is composed of hardware, software and algorithmic bricks that can be interfaced in a simple way using "plug-and-play" principles at the hardware and software level. Applications and demonstrations can be programmed using a dedicated development environment tailored for context-aware wearable computing applications. This educational kit allows students to have a first hand experience of the possibilities and limitations of wearable computing, within the duration of a lecture or a lab course. Our development strategy consists in creating an extensible alternative therapy hardware/software architecture as the core of the kit. The kit is fitted with an initial set of hardware building blocks (i.e. wearable devices comprising motion sensor and physiological sensors). These blocks are selected so that a large variety of wearable computing systems can be demonstrated, yet the number of devices remains small. With these initial building blocks the system is directly applicable for our teaching purposes. Later on, the kit can be seamlessly extended with additional functionalities (new sensors, new algorithms) by incremental development.
In addition to developing this kit, teaching material and tutorials need to be developed to support hands-on courses based on this kit. The kit follows an open source philosophy, with hardware and software released as open-hardware and open-software.
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