[Wear-Hard] Passive Uses For Your Wearable

[DUVAL Sébastien]

As the uses of wearables depend on their form factor, on the
perspectives of the designers, and on the life of users, we can come up
with an endless list of services. Consider the following as a simple way
to stimulate your imagination.

For passive uses, you may consider:
* Assessing the causes of sleep disorders as light may induce drifts in
the biological clock.
* Assessing the growth or decline of users e.g. diversity of words or
movements produced by a child or elder.
* Compensating a disability e.g. altering sounds according to the user's
hearing range.
* Evaluating the health of the user or possibly her foetus.
* Evaluating shocks to detect e.g. car accidents, falls (especially for
pregnant, sick, old, or challenged people).
* Evaluating vibrations e.g. to assess working conditions on
construction sites or the occurrence of earthquakes.

For passive inputs, you can add:
* Accelerometers.
* Bio-sensors e.g. ECG, skin conductivity.
* Sensors for ultraviolet light.

Note: Temperature sensors may be used to monitor the environment or the
user's body, but the hardware requirements are completely different.

Has anybody heard of usable sensors to assess air quality (e.g.
pollution) or the presence of allergens (e.g. pollen)?


-- 
DUVAL Sébastien
Currently in 서울 (Seoul, South Korea)

tetsu yatsu wrote:
> I thought this topic deserved it's own thread.
> 
> What passive uses/interfaces can you all think of (or currently know
> of/use) for a wearable? For those without an adequate input device,
> this could keep us on track after the novelty of hacking a monocle
> into a pair of safety glasses wears off. There are also moments you
> won't want to focus on keying/typing your thoughts, but are still
> wasting valuable processor cycles and power that could give you a
> little bit of information.
> 
> Passive Inputs:
> Camera
> GPS
> Audio
> Magnetic Sensor
> Tilt Sensors
> Network Connectivity
> Radio
> Temperature Measures
> Luminosity Measures
> Hygrometer Measures
> [add more if you think of any]
> 
> Passive Uses:
> GPGPU/OpenVidia like image processing and overlay
> Geolocational relevant data from network sources or device cache
> Persistent audio recording/tagging/file splitting
> Twitter updates (with whatever data you can get without a keyer)
> Magnetic Sensor readings - just because it's fun.
> IR Viewer - see the world in infrared, it sounds so cool!
> Passively Sniff Ambient Network Traffic - see the EEBBCD's of SMB's
> broadcast messages!
> Scan Local EM Sources with radio - there was a project on
> we-make-money-not-art about this some time ago
> Record Video Everywhere - storage-resource intensive
> Sousveillance - it's what we're here for, according to some
> Ambient Sensors - when someone says 'its hot in here', or 'it's really
> bright out', have a Real answer :)
> Relevant Information Database Lookups - based on what information is
> available, a list of Most Likely relevant information (PageRank
> sorted?)
> 
> 
> I've also been getting into Machine Learning at my job, so I see a lot
> of neat applications with that. (Take every input source as
> attributes, train a classifier to classify relevant information,
> display that.)
> 
> Suggestions, comments?