What are? Wearables

What are wearables? Wearables stand for wearable technologies, devices that can be worn as accessories embedded into clothing, or even implanted in the body of the user.

Hello, I'm Giovanni Saggio and my work is my passion. I teach electronics at university level, and I design and develop new electronics for biotech applications. I am very happy to introduce you to some exciting new technologies, especially wearables.

These are wearables. This one is another wearable too. This is a wearable called the high-tech glove, which I developed in my lab. I use it to work with my computer without touching the keyboard or mouse. My gestures are recognised, and I can move the cursor or write simply moving my hand in the air like this. Fascinating, isn’t it?

This glove, plus artificial intelligence, allows people with hearing or speaking difficulties to convert their gestures into speech through a voice synthesiser.

Here is another wearable. ORII ring, commercialised by Origami Group. It is a ring that connects with my smartphone. And when I receive a call, I can answer without touching my smartphone but simply like that. Signals are transmitted via bone conduction. My bones carry the signal from the ring to my ear. Dangerous? Not at all.

Now let's look at high-tech smart headwear. My colleagues and I developed this to let a paraplegic child play with a toy car. His head movements were converted into the movements of the car. Later, by moving his head, he could select icons on a screen, and with each icon issue the common commands like a switch on the light, open the window, answer the telephone and so on, just through the movements of his head.

This is a single wearable in a network of up to 16 wearables called Move It. You can locate them in any segment of your body. This came out of my lab and is commercialised now by a startup called Captiks. With this wearable, plus the software motion studio, you can measure and obtain a report on your motor force in terms of energy spending, power development acceleration velocity, rotation of each single part of your body.

Okay but what's that for? Captiks has proved essential in improving the performance of many soccer players in the Italian leagues, even helping them win trophies. Such wearables have already been successfully adopted in other sports, such as cycling, ice skating, golf, archery, just to mention a few.

I will show you the most incredible wearables. They will amaze you, but they are already with us, you just haven't heard about them. Wearable accessories are now sold all around the world, led by the two you already know: smartwatches and headphones. But the real intriguing wearables are still pretty unknown, so we will go deeper into this during the series, so stick with us please.

You will discover how new wearables are becoming a part of each of us, allowing for incredible new possibilities. So, who else wears wearables? Everyone can wear wearables according to their needs. Wearables are used by sportsmen and sportswomen, patients and doctors, police and rescuers, even spies and so on, but wearables can generally be worn by everyone once, and even by pets and can also be placed in home furniture.

We can use wearables to measure our body status and activities, wear them as tools to increase our capabilities.

That's all we have time for today, why not join me next time when I will explain you the sensory glove in more detail.