Body Sensor Networking, Design and Algorithms

1Introduction

1.1 History of Wearable Technology

Earlier in history, it would take hundreds of years between breakthroughs such as eyeglasses being developed in 1286 and the abacus ring being manufactured in 1600. Today, new wearable tech innovations happen on a monthly basis, if not weekly. In the last 10 years, we have had the Google Glass, Fitbit, Oculus Rift, and countless others.

The Nuremberg egg manufactured in 1510 by Peter Henlein was one of the early portable mechanical timekeeping devices (like a watch) which had a chain to hang over the neck. An air-conditioned top hat was a wearable designed by a Victorian in the nineteenth century. In 1890, a lighting company in New York used to send girls with wearable lights onto the performance stage and to light up houses during ceremonies. In the1960s, the wearers of roulette shoes, created by Edward Thorp and Claude Shannon, used to observe the rotations of the roulette ball, tap the shoe accordingly, and then receive a vibration telling them which number to bet on. In 1963, a small portable TV screen was worn as a glass. The aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont pioneered the use of the wristwatch in 1904 as it allowed him to have his hands free while flying. This also led people to start using wristwatches. Calculator watches came onto market in 1975 and the first low-cost Walkman stereo was offered by Sony in 1979. In the 1990s, interest in the Internet of Things (IoT) started to rise. In December 1994, Steve Mann, a Canadian ...