Making Regular Eyeglasses Smart

Abstract

M ost of our senses, vital signs, and actions involve the head, making the human skull one of the most interesting body locations for the simultaneous sensing and interaction of assistance applications. Although hearing aids and mobile headsets have become widely accepted as headworn devices, users in public spaces often consider novel head-attached sensors and devices to be uncomfortable, irritating, or stigmatizing. Nevertheless, numerous wearable computing studies have shown that headworn sensors and adequate signal processing could reveal cognition-related behavior and essential vital parameters (such as heartbeat and breathing rates). Behavior and vital data is the key component for many assistance applications in daily life, from those that offer memory augmentation to those advising chronically ill patients. Assistance applications thus require continuous measurements and context estimation.Today's regular eyeglasses could fill the gap between sensing and assistance in daily life. Most eyeglasses are publicly accepted accessories, often worn continuously throughout the day, rendering them an ideal platform for additional assistive functions. In contrast to Google Glass and early wearable system approaches that just attached devices to standard glasses, we envision exploiting smart eyeglasses for assistance applications through fully integrated sensing, processing, and interaction functions in the regular spectacles design, thus maximizing unobtrusiveness. We also envision embedded software apps that let wearers dynamically alter assistance functionality depending on momentary needs. With a rich set of software apps that can be selectively run on smart eyeglasses, one pair of smart eyeglasses could serve various purposes in daily life and provide novel assistance applications in continuous monitoring, augmentation, and therapy, beyond what smartphones and smart watches can achieve today. They would offer much more than short-term interaction and quick information access.Although the first steps toward commercial smart eyeglasses are currently being made (with J!NS MEME; www.jins-jp.com/jinsmeme/en), scientific analyses and studies of variable assistive functions in smart eyeglasses are lacking. Consequently, opportunities and requirements for smart eyeglasses and assistance applications are unclear. Following from commercial examples, smart eyeglasses seem to be primarily useful in sensing and processing tasks, given that eyeglasses provide access to unique sensor locations near the head. Here, we present an architecture for integrating technology into traditional eyeglass designs, discuss ergonomic design requirements, and derive recommendations for further smart eyeglasses developments. In three case studies, we observed the potential of using smart eyeglasses for assistive functions. Software apps running on smart eyeglasses offer unobtrusive universal assistance systems that can support wearers in their daily lives. The authors describe a blueprint of the embedded architecture of smart eyeglasses and di...

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