The ‘Smart Era’ is exploding with smart gadgets floating all around us. The willingness to adapt these gadgets is fast-booming. But lets speak facts: are these devices ‘really smart’?
Let us begin with Design Tips for smart devices. Below are the minimum requirements of a today’s smart device:
Communication: The gadget must be able to communicate with other gadgets, using a secure communication channel. Notifications can be used to communicate with the user.
Intelligence: Gadget should make use of analytics, big data, sensors-which are embedded in the device.
Enhancement: Must enhance the user’s behavior, actions and experiences in real world and real-time.
Supportive Design: It must communicate with an expanding wide range community of wearables, platforms, future services, big data analytic systems and the cloud too.
User Interaction: Ensure minimal user input is required for the device to operate smoothly. This will make gadget more easy to use.
The design tips are not limited to above topics but may also include points like data privacy, real-time feeds, feasibility and lot more.
In the market, we have many smart wearables readily available, and many more are on the way. These devices cover a spectrum of data including corporate, healthcare, personal, military implementations, entertainment gadgets, gaming, daily needs and house automation (whole new world in it!)
Let us look into few of these smart wearables:
Activity Tracker: This gadget comes in design of a wrist band. It monitors your day-to-day activities like it tracks your walk (based on sensor and pre-defined stride i.e. count of your steps), duration of your walk and total calories burnt (active and inactive calories). It also syncs wirelessly with your smart phone. Even it displays text alerts and incoming calls directly on your wrist.
Healthcare: There are devices that are used by doctors to monitor body temperature, blood pressure (using smart wireless device), ECG, Oximetry, heart rate analysis and breathe rate tracking. These smart gadgets sync up easily with your smart phone.
Sleep Tracker: Using an accelerometer in your wearable, tracks your sleep cycle and uses smart wake-up tactics. It also shows sleep graph, sleep deficits, deep sleep and snoring stats.
Smart Suit: No – I am not referring to the Iron-man suit, yet. But to a sophisticated and highly advanced body armor. Wondering its implementations? Defense Personnel, Smart COPs, Smart Interview (maybe), Smart Politician (maybe in backend they are doing deep analysis of your personal data and planning elections) and Smart People.
Smart wearables have not only opened doors for good things, but also endless possibility for hackers to grab our personal data. Imagine a situation where your healthcare data is compromised. The hacker can now sell this critical information to other doctors, pharma companies and also give it to the dark side (no comments).
Don’t forget to check privacy breaches due to smart wearables in:
Smart Wearables: Privacy Concerns..!!—Part 2 (Published)