Wearable technology, fashionable technology, wearable devices, tech togs, or fashion electronics are clothing and accessories incorporating computer and advanced electronic technologies. The designs often incorporate practical functions and features, but may also have a purely critical or aesthetic agenda. Technology is now present in other specified sector like mode and industry. Today Brand can add values on their product using technology and creating a new design, a new style for a segment of customers. The price of the product can increased and show the specificity and the quality of the brand.
Wearable technologies have lot of distinct utilities such as :
The body is both the controller and the interface. So, there are some distinct part of our body concerned by wearable technologies, but some are most developed than others. Indeed, the most important used part is the wrist which represents 30% and the head which represents 22%. However, 56% of wearable technologies are dependent because they need a device to make sense of the data or control the function, and only 18% can be used without a device.
Wearable technology is related to both the field of ubiquitous computing and the history and development of wearable computers. It begins with the calculator watch, introduced in the 1980s, for instance. It was one original piece of widespread worn electronics. And now it can be represented by Twitter: the users can wear a "Pocket Tweet" using a Java application and cutting out and applying a Twitter text bubble to a person's shirt, one example of Do-it-yourself wearable tech that was part of an art exhibit for the Wearable Technology AIR project in spring 2009.
Nevertheless, concerning electronic textiles, they are distinct from wearable computing. Indeed, emphasis is placed on the seamless integration of textiles with electronic elements like microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators. Furthermore, e-textiles don’t always need to be wearable. For instance, e-textiles are also found in interior design. The related field of fibertronics explores how electronic and computational functionality can be integrated into textile fibers.
It was developed by Google with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information in a Smartphone-like hands-free format. Wearers communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands. Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified "Glass Explorers" in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014,for the same price. On January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype but remained committed to the development of the product. In its eyes, Project Glass was ready to "graduate" from Google Labs, the experimental phase of the project.
People are addicted by these new accessories. It is very interesting to mix technology and industrial product and show how can technology be adapted on wearable product . To my mind this show the impact of the technology on companies and on the world in general. If technology is criticized by some group of people, technology is still predominant in our life ( industry, tools, wearable..)
People seem to really like this kind of technology for many reasons but there are also drawbacks. Even if wearable technology allows users to improve their lifestyle, it happened that products involve problems related to private life. For example, textile wearable technologies can give to people their temperature or pulse but can also track people with GPS features and send information to databases. Plus, people on social network can see how many calories a people lost which can be intrusive. Users have to be careful and chose what they want to share on social networks and other platforms.