Computers strive to be active-wear

SAN FRANCISCO – THE HAND-HELD device — a cell phone or personal digital assistant — has paved the way
for computers you wear like the shirt on your back. Or the belt at your waist.

By Francine Brevetti Business Writer Oakland Tribune

Already we see people walking and riding with an earphone in their ear regardless of whether they are
actually using their cell phones. It’s just a skip and a jump until you’ll be sporting a "smart" body — outfitted
with wearable keyboard, display screen and mouse.

A Gartner Group study has predicted that 60 percent of Americans from ages 15 to 50 will be wearing wireless
computing power by 2007. While this can entail a variety of devices, the core technology may be the
ear-mounted speakers and microphones that allow people to interact through voice recognition.

Accenture, headquartered in Palo Alto, is working on a prototype it calls a personal awareness assistant — PAA.
The user wears a computer on a belt that uses speech recognition technology and a microphone to record key
phrases, names and requests as its user commands.

For example, a businesswoman is working an exhibition hall, meeting and greeting suppliers and customers.
She records her contacts’ names and identities as she meets them. Later she can request her PAA to remind
her whom she met when and where — information she hears through her headset.

"Memory augmentation, location-based positioning systems and collaboration are the three killer apps" that
constitute today’s state of wearable computing, said Accenture research associate Owen Richter as he
demonstrated the prototype at the company’s San Francisco office. "The Holy Grail of wearable computing is
that you grab and throw it on like a jacket and take it off."

A variety of industrial situations make wearable computing a natural, for instance in maintenance and repair
situations where one needs both hands free. Accenture is also fusing the cell phone and Instant Messenger
software for teams who use instant messaging as their primary means of communication.

"I can send an instant message to your wearable computer and it can be whispered in your ear," he said. "I
can do it covertly if I am in the same meeting with you. I can say, ‘Slow down, you’re talking too fast’ by
inputting this message on my laptop. For all (the other participants) know, I’m just inputting notes on the
laptop. I can also pull back stock or inventory information this way."

Wearable computing is a technology that is still largely in development by companies such as Accenture,
which is not yet putting these products on the market, and institutions such as Stanford University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But Stanford’s wearable computing laboratory, under the directorship of Vaughan Pratt, has been spun off into
Tiqit (www.tiqit.com) in Redwood City, where Pratt is now chairman. Tiqit’s game plan is definitely geared
toward the marketplace.

It’s Matchbox PC is the smallest handheld on the market at 2.8 inches by 1.8 inches. As its name suggests, it is
clearly the size of a matchbox (http://wearables.Stanford.edu).

Accenture and Tiqit disagree over the need for heavy computing power in wearables. Accenture’s latest
version uses a Compaq iPAC because, Richter explained, the company decided to forgo functionality for
greater ease of use and speed.

But Tiqit’s Matchbox, small as it is, supports the more massive Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems.

"Wearables tend to be bulky if on the Windows or Linux operating systems," Pratt said. "Compaq’s iPAQ and
the PalmPilot run on different operating systems and you don’t get the benefits of a laptop or a desktop.
People in the wearable community, those doing research at MIT and Stanford, want a real computer as
opposed to those specially cut down to size."

Tiqit sells its technology to the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia for logging data from submersible
equipment. The Stanford spin-off was preparing to unveil a wearable and commercially available product at
the trade show CeBIT, going on in Hanover, Germany.

While the current Tiqit model does not have speech recognition like Accenture’s, Pratt said Tiqit technology
was powerful enough to support it.

The MIT project, called MIThril (www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril) has designed a vest and headset as its
platform for interaction between the body and the computer. The vest encases a variety of devices for
computing (Linux OS), networking and sensing. The Memory Glasses sit on the nose and ears like wired
spectacles.

Just as speech recognition systems can feed back spoken data on command, the Memory Glasses offer visual
cues to stimulate memory. The laboratory foresees applications for its prototypes in health, communications
and just-in-time manufacturing delivery systems. However, it does not see them as being commercially
available in their current forms soon, if ever.

Francine Brevetti can be reached at (510) 208-6416 and [email protected].

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