page_title: Wearable computer
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Wearable computer / History
caption_attribution_description: English: This depicts the evolution of wearable computers. See http://wearcam.org/steve5.htm for the original JPEG file.
context_page_description: A wearable computer, also known as a wearable or body-borne computer, is a small computing device worn on the body.
  The definition of 'wearable computer' may be narrow or broad, extending to smartphones or even ordinary wristwatches.
  Wearables may be for general use, in which case they are just a particularly small example of mobile computing. Alternatively they may be for specialized purposes such as fitness trackers. They may incorporate special sensors such as accelerometers, thermometer and heart rate monitors, or novel user interfaces such as Google Glass, an optical head-mounted display controlled by gestures. It may be that specialized wearables will evolve into general all-in-one devices, as happened with the convergence of PDAs and mobile phones into smartphones.
  Wearables are typically worn on the wrist, hung from the neck, strapped to the arm or leg, or on the head, though some have been located elsewhere. Devices carried in a pocket or bag – such as smartphones and before them pocket calculators and PDAs, may or may not be regarded as 'worn'.
context_section_description: Due to the varied definitions of "wearable" and "computer", the first wearable computer could be as early as the first abacus on a necklace, a 16th-century abacus ring, a wristwatch and 'finger-watch' owned by Queen Elizabeth I of England, or the covert timing devices hidden in shoes to cheat at roulette by Thorp and Shannon in the 1960s and 1970s.
  However, a computer is not merely a time-keeping or calculating device, but rather a user-programmable item for complex algorithms, interfacing, and data management. By this definition, the wearable computer was invented by Steve Mann, in the late 1970s:
  Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, was hailed as the father of the wearable computer and the ISSCC's first virtual panelist, by moderator Woodward Yang of Harvard University (Cambridge Mass.).
  — IEEE ISSCC 8 Feb. 2000
  The development of wearable items has taken several steps of miniaturization from discrete electronics over hybrid designs to fully integrated designs, where just one processor chip, a battery and some interface conditioning items make the whole unit.
caption: Evolution of Steve Mann's WearComp wearable computer from backpack based systems of the 1980s to his current covert systems
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