Slides presented during the product design session at the Annual Meeting of HFES 2014. Principles to design wearable devices.

1. HFES – Human Factors and Ergonomic Society
2014 International Annual Meeting
HUMAN FACTORS
CONSIDERATIONS
IN THE DESIGN OF
WEARABLE DEVICES
VIVIAN GENARO MOTTI
KELLY CAINE
CLEMSON UNIVERSI TY
Chicago, October 30th, 2014

2. WEARABLE DEVICES
• Large potential
• Variety of sensors
• Several form factors
• Multiple applications
2

3. LARGE POTENTIAL AND USE
3

4. POTENTIAL BENEFICIARIES
Owlet
[Kunze, et al. 2014. Wearable
computing for older adults: initial
insights into head-mounted display
usage. In UbiComp '14]

5. WEARABLES
• Large potential
• Challenging to consider Human Factors
• Heterogeneity of users
• Dynamic contexts
• Different wishes, needs, requirements, and
preferences
5

6. USERS’ ENGAGEMENT
6

7. USERS’ ENGAGEMENT
• More than half of U.S. consumers who have owned
an activity tracker no longer use it
• A third of U.S. consumers who have owned one
stopped using the device within 6 months of
receiving it
[Ledger, D., & McCaffrey, D. (2014).
Inside Wearables: How the Science of
Human Behavior Change Offers
the Secret to Long-Term Engagement]
7

8. WHY?
• Wearable devices have a low wearability
• sensor, battery and on-body hardware size tends to be too
bulky
[Pantelopoulos, A., & Bourbakis, N. (2008).
A Survey on Wearable Biosensor Systems
for Health Monitoring, 4887–4890.]
8

9. • Simply shrinking down computing tools from the
desktop paradigm to a more portable scale only
makes them into mini PC’s
• It does not take advantage of the opportunities
presented by a whole new context of use
• It does not regard the human body as a context
[Gemperle, F., et al. (1998).
Design for wearability.
2nd ISWC]
9
PARADIGMATIC SHIFT

10. USERS: OUT OF THE LOOP
• Design process not focused on the user
• Heterogeneous profiles
• Different needs, wishes, requirements, preferences
• Dynamic contexts of use
• Their perspectives are often unknown or ignored
10

11. GOAL
• Identify principles relevant to the human-centered
design of wearables
• Integrate human factors since early design stages
of wearable applications
• Impact users’ acceptance, satisfaction, sustained
engagement

12. METHOD
• Systematic Literature Review
• Key design principles
• Successful wearable applications
• Wearable devices
• 18 form factors: “anklet”, “armband”, “belt”, “bra”,
“bracelet”, “contact lenses”, “chest mounted”, “earring”,
“earpiece”, “glasses”, “glove”, “headphone”, “head
mounted”, “necklace”, “ring”, “shirt”, “shoe” and “watch”
• 4 digital libraries: ACM DL, IEEEXplore, Springer, Google
Scholar
• Human-centered principles and quality factors

13. DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR
WEARABILITY
• Wearability
• Degree of comfort: physical, mental, emotional, social
• Encompasses a series of principles involving
• Physical aspects of the devices and their relationship with the
human user
• Human factors
• Quality factors
[Lucy E. Dunne and Barry Smyth. 2007.
Psychophysical elements of wearability.
In CHI '07]
13

14. PHYSICAL ASPECTS
• Aesthetics
• Fashion
• Affordance
• Comfort
• Obtrusiveness
• Subtlety
Sony HMz-T1
Polar band

15. HUMAN FACTORS
• Ease of Use
• Ergonomic
• Intuitiveness
• User-friendliness
• Simplicity
• Overload
• Satisfaction
UV Ring
Smart watch

16. QUALITY FACTORS
• Privacy
• Reliability
• Resistance
• Responsiveness
• Contextual-awareness
• Customization
Glucometer
Glass

17. APPLICATION
17

18. DISCUSSION
• Wearability Principles
• Trade-offs
• Complementarity
• Overlapping
• Extensive
• Prioritize

19. CONCLUSION
• Better defining wearability principles aims at
helping designers
• To identify and consider users’ requirements since
the early design stages of wearable devices
• To improve their design

20. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant No.
1314342. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this material are
those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect
the views of the National Science Foundation

21. REFERENCES
• Cho, G. (Ed.). (2010). Smart clothing: technology and applications. CRC
Press. Taylor & Francis
• Kai Kunze, Niels Henze, and Koichi Kise. 2014. Wearable computing for
older adults: initial insights into head-mounted display usage. In
Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on
Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct Publication (UbiComp '14
Adjunct). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 83-86. DOI=10.1145/2638728.2638747
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2638728.2638747
• Ledger, D., & McCaffrey, D. (2014). Inside Wearables How the Science of
Human Behavior Change Offers the Secret to Long-Term Engagement (p.
18). Endeavour Research Report.
• Motti, V. G. & Caine, K. E. (2014). Understanding the Wearability of Head-mounted
Devices from a Human-Centered Perspective. Proceedings of
the International Symposium on Wearable Computers ISWC’14.
• Motti, V. G. & Caine, K. E. (2014). Human Factors Considerations in the
Design of Wearable Devices. Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society 2014 Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL: Human Factors
and Ergonomics Society.
• Siewiorek, D., Smailagic, A., & Starner, T. (2008). Application Design for
Wearable Computing. (M. Satyanarayanan, Ed.) (p. 74). Mor-gan &
Claypool.

22. Q&A