Department: Wearable Computing€rnberg
Editors: Oliver Amft, Institute of Medical Informatics at FAU Erlangen-Nu
Kristof Van Laerhoven, University of Siegen

ISWC 2018: Towards
Smarter Wearable
Technologies That Blend
With Our Bodies
Roshan Peiris
Keio Univeristy

Michael Beigl
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Thad Starner
Georgia Institute of Technology

Kai Kunze
Keio University& WEARABLES ARE OFTEN associated with smart
watches or clunky accessories. Yet the visionof wearable computing is to create computational systems that tightly couple with ourbodies.
To discuss the newest trends in this field,
wearable computing researchers, professionals, and enthusiasts met at the 2018 ACMInternational Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) in Singapore in October 2018.
Following long-standing tradition, the conference was colocated with the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive andDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPRV.2019.2912252
Date of current version 25 July 2019.

961536-1268 ß 2019 IEEE

Ubiquitous Computing. This year, we received
108 submissions (62 long papers, 29 shortpapers, and 17 briefs) with an acceptance rateof 27% for the long paper track.

HOT TOPICS
This year, several strong papers exploredapplied machine learning techniques for onbody activity recognition. Another emerging
direction is blending wearables with the humanbody in the form of haptics and textiles. Last but
not the least, as the field matures, continue to
see wearable computing applied in a wider variety of real world, in the wild use cases. Although
there were many interesting publications, here
we highlight only a few articles focusing on

Published by the IEEE Computer SocietyIEEE Pervasive Computing

Figure 1. Examples of some work at ISWC 2018. (a) Conveying language through haptics: A multisensory approach byDunkelberger et al. (b) Movelet: A self-actuated movable bracelet for positional haptic feedback on the user’s forearmby Dobbelstein et al. (c) Shape memory alloy wire actuators for soft, wearable haptic devices by Chernyshov et al.

recognizing activities, blending with the body,and studying systems in the wild.

Recognizing Activities Smarter€ tz1 adapt attention models
Murahari and Plofor human activity recognition based on sensor
data. It is exciting to see state-of-the-art machinelearning adapted and applied to human activity,
as most sensing approaches still use fixed size
temporal context to represent different activities.
Attention models learn a set of weights over input
data. The authors weight the temporal context tomodel individual sensor readings. They apply themodels on large standard datasets of activity recognition and show their usefulness.
In another paper on activity recognition, Kwon
et al.2 show how to utilize distribution-based sensor representations to improve feature calculations for human activity recognition by adding
temporal and frequency structures. This approachenables activity recognition chains to exploit thetemporal structure of the data more easily.
Blending With the Body (Haptics and Textiles)
This year, we saw more fascinating papers
related to wearable haptics systems and application cases (Figure 1). Two research groups presented work on communicating language throughhaptic stimuli. Dunkelberger et al.3 describe amultiactuator haptic device that can be worn on
the upper arm and is capable of producing briefcues to encode English phonemes. Luzhnica et al.
train the skill of comprehending text from vibrotactile patterns using passive haptic learning, aApril-June 2019

method that teaches manual skills while requiring
little to no active attention by the user.
Other work focused on encoding continuous
information (e.g., progress) on a haptic channel.
Dobbelstein introduce a sleeve-robotic braceletthat can move automatically along the user’s
arm and presented several application scenarios.4 Chernyshov et al.5 describe pressure feedback rings worn on the finger that create a onedimensional information display.

Studying People in the Wild
ISWC this year also featured a wide variety of
applications in domains such as health care,social engagement, and industrial use. Schiboni
and Amft6 show how to detect drinking a beverage, a sparse natural gesture, by testing with arealistic, free-living dataset that includes a total of
35 days of annotated inertial sensor recordings
from seven participants. Ward et al.7 show how tomeasure nonverbal social coordination in groupsof people and study the social engagement of children with autism in a theatrical workshop.

AWARDS
The three best paper award nominees thatwere selected by the PC committee reflect thethree hot topics described above (Figure 2). First,
Zeng et al.8 were nominated for their work on“Understanding and improving recurrent networks for human activity recognition by continuous attention.” Computational neural networks
applied to activity recognition are often difficult tointerpret, and so, Zeng et al. propose two attention
models for human activity recognition (temporal97

Wearable Computing

Figure 2. Award winning work at ISWC 2018. (a) “RF-pick: Comparing order picking using a HUD with wearable RFID
verification to traditional pick methods” by Thomas et al. (best paper winner). (b) “SkinMorph: Texture-tunable on-skininterface through thin, programmable gel” by Kao et al. (best paper honorable mention). (c) “Understanding and improving
recurrent networks for human activity recognition by continuous attention” by Zeng et al. (best paper honorable mention).

attention and sensor attention). They evaluate themodels on three datasets and show that theresults correlate well with human intuition.
The second best paper nomination went to
Kao et al.10 for their work on “Skinmorph: Texture-tunable on-skin interface through thin, programmable gel.” Skinmorph presented an on-skininterface that can selectively transition between
soft and rigid states to serve as a texture-tunable
wearable skin output. In addition to the fabrication process details, the authors present interesting examples such as a carpal tunnel splint forrehabilitation, a protective layer for joints whenengaging in high-impact activities, and foot pads
when wearing uncomfortable shoes.
The final best paper nomination went toThomas et al.9 for the “RF-pick: Comparing orderpicking using a HUD with wearable RFID verification to traditional pick methods.” This paperpresents a method that uses a combination of RFID
tags with a head-up display for reducing humanerrors during order picking in warehouses. Theauthors compare their method with three more
traditional methods such as pick-to-light with button verification, pick-to-paper with barcode verification, and pick-to-paper with no verification.
The TPC Chairs and the Award Committee
presented the Best Paper Award to Thomas et al.
The other two works received Best Paper Honorable Mention awards.
In addition, the Technical Program Committee, headed by Michael Beigl and Roshan Peiris,awarded two impact awards this year. First, the10-year Impact Award for the paper with mostimpact from ISWC 2008 went to “Using mobilephones to determine transportation by mode”
by Sasank Reddy, Jeff Burke, Deborah Estrin,

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Mark Hansen, and Mani Srivastava. The 20-year
Impact Award for the paper with most impact
from the second ISWC in 1998 was awarded tothe paper titled “Parasitic power harvesting inshoes” by Ioannis Kymissis, Clyde Kendall,
Joseph Paradiso, and Neil Gershenfeld.

DESIGN EXHIBITIONISWC’s annual design exhibition brought
together fashion designers, researchers, and product vendors to share advances in on-body technology. With participants from Finland, Germany, theNetherlands, Singapore, and the United States,
the event showcased exciting interactive designs
that gave the wearer actuated wings (for a theatrical play), encouraged empathy and connection
between strangers using heat or visualization ofcommon interests in social media, explored augmentation of human vision, networked garments
to create a color-changing child’s costume, sensed
physiological signals and activities, mapped meaningful alerts to haptics across the body, andhighlighted current issues such as the diminishingcoral reefs and the importance of the microbiome.

JOIN US FOR ISWC 2019
The next ISWC will be held in London in September 9th–13th, 2019 (http://iswc.net/iswc19/). The
paper submission deadline is April 26, 2019, andthe tutorial proposals deadline is June 14, 2019.

& REFERENCES€ tz, “On attention models for
1. V. S. Murahari and T. Plohuman activity recognition,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp.
Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 100–103. [Online].
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267287

IEEE Pervasive Computing€tz, “Adding
2. H. Kwon, G. D. Abowd, and T. Plostructural characteristics to distribution-based
accelerometer representations for activity recognition

Symp. Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 148–155.
[Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267263

using wearables,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp. Wearable

8. M. Zeng et al., “Understanding and improving

Comput., 2018, pp. 72–75. [Online]. Available: https://recurrent networks for human activity recognition by

doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267258

continuous attention,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp.

3. N.

Dunkelberger

etal.,“Conveyinglanguagethrough haptics: A multi-sensory approach,” inProc. ACM Int. Symp. Wearable Comput., 2018,

Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 56–63. [Online].
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267286
9. C.

Thomas,T.

Panagiotopoulos,P.

Kotipalli,

pp. 25–32. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/M. Haynes, and T. Starner, “RF-pick: Comparing order

10.1145/3267242.3267244

picking using a HUD with wearable RFID verification to

4. D. Dobbelstein, E. Stemasov, D. Besserer, I. Stenske,traditional pick methods,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp.

and E. Rukzio, “Movelet: A self-actuated movable

Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 168–175. [Online].

bracelet for positional haptic feedback on the user’s

Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267290

forearm,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp. Wearable Comput.,

10. H.-L. (Cindy) Kao, M. Bamforth, D. Kim, and C.

2018, pp. 33–39. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/

Schmandt, “Skinmorph: Texture-tunable on-skin interface

10.1145/3267242.3267249

through thin, programmable gel,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp.

5. G. Chernyshov, B. Tag, C. Caremel, F. Cao, G. Liu,and K. Kunze, “Shape memory alloy wire actuators forWearable Comput., 2018, pp. 196–203. [Online].
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267262

soft, wearable haptic devices,” in Proc. ACM Int.
Symp. Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 112–119.
[Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267257
6. G. Schiboni and O. Amft, “Sparse natural gesture
spotting in free living to monitor drinking with wristworn inertial sensors,” in Proc. ACM Int. Symp.
Wearable Comput., 2018, pp. 140–147. [Online].
Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/3267242.3267253
7. J. A Ward, D. Richardson, G. Orgs, K. Hunter, andRoshan Peiris is a Project Senior AssistantProfessor at Keio Media Design. Contact him at
roshan82@gmail.com.
Thad Starner is a Professor of computing withGeorgia Tech. Contact him at thadstarner@gmail.com.
Michael Beigl is a Professor at Karlsruhe Instituteof Technology and the Head of the TECO ResearchGroup. Contact him at michael@teco.edu.

A. Hamilton, “Sensing interpersonal synchrony
between actors and autistic children in theatreusing wrist-worn accelerometers,” in Proc. ACM Int.

April-June 2019

Kai Kunze is a Professor at Keio Media Design(KMD). Contact him at kai.kunze@gmail.com.

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