Functional Now, Wearable Later: Examining the Design Practices of Wearable Technologists

Making a body-worn device wearable is a deceptively difficult challenge: it is not enough to make a functional device and simply put it on the body; it must also work with the wearer to create a positive body-product relationship. In order for a body-mounted device to achieve true wearability, proper attention must also be paid to a multitude of additional questions, including things like device size, mass, rigidity, comfort, aesthetics, and other critical design criteria above and beyond raw functionality. This paper reviews papers from the International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC) and the Journal of Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) to understand the extent to which these professional communities acknowledge and incorporate fundamental questions of wearability into their work. The results found that while wearability is relatively present in the literature (84.44% of ISWC papers, 74.54% of IMWUT papers), there are many papers that fail to address wearability with the appropriate scientific rigor assuming they do address wearability at all. These results demonstrate the need for the wearables community to recognize the functional importance of wearability and its necessity to the design process.