Smartphones have become an integral part of our day-to-day life over the last decade or so. They have become a natural extension of ourselves and have made us carry them everywhere in our pockets, handbags, or purses to help us fulfill our day-to-day tasks. They are used to perform mundane to more important tasks. The tasks that were performed using personal computers or laptops have slowly been done through pocket-sized smartphones or tablets.
The reason smartphones have reached a high level of adoption and popularity is due to their portability. They are light relative to personal laptops, easy to carry around, and users can use them pretty much anywhere they are needed.
Although mobile phones and tablets can satisfy most computing needs on the go, they're not very convenient in many situations. Mobile phones are not easy when you are already busy with one hand and want to work with the phone in the other hand. To do subtle tasks such as checking the current time or have a quick look at incoming text notifications, you still need to remove the phone from the pocket or remove it from the purse. Wearable devices can help us get things done faster with simpler and quicker interactions.
Wearable computing is the next big frontier in computing innovation. It has all kinds of possibilities and advantages. Although the smartphones are considered very personal devices, they are not quite as intimate as wearable devices such as smartwatches or fitness activity trackers. Wearable devices or body-borne devices have the advantage of being on the body all the time and measuring important metrics such as heart rate, walk steps, and body temperature.
They have a huge potential in the healthcare market, where they can monitor our health condition every minute and guide users through the steps needed to have a healthy lifestyle.
Wearable devices can also be used for biometric authentication. There are some startups, such as Nymi (https://nymi.com/using_the_nymi_band), who use individual heart and pulse rates as an identification factor for authentications.
How about we stop carrying the RFID-based access cards for entering buildings and use a wearable watch for authentication? It may even stop us needing to remember all kinds of passwords for various online websites; instead, we could use biometric data such as heart rate and iris recognition and build an authentication profile for logging into those systems.
