Martin Hollywood, lead creative technologist at Razorfish London highlights the role of wearables as notification devices.
MobileHelp's alert and fall notification devices work inside and outside the home, giving customers a way to report emergencies no matter where they are.
The consumer electronics space is currently lousy with all manner of wearables — be it step counters, fitness trackers, heart rate monitors or other personal quantification and/or notification devices.
Ive has been thinking about "a wearable notification device paired to a phone" since around the time of Steve Jobs's death, in 2011: The Shape of Things to Come Could Jony Ive Pull off an Apple Car?
Apple was working on a watch before Google revealed its smartglasses, but even so it was clear to Ive that the face "was the wrong place" and that the wrist was "the obvious and right place" for a notification device.
"You're thinking, What are people going to need?" In 2011, largely thanks to advances in the miniaturization of technology, the answer seemed to be a wearable notification device paired to a phone making it yet simpler to exchange messages of love, or tardiness.
Ive has been thinking about "a wearable notification device paired to a phone" since around the time of Steve Jobs's death, in 2011: That summer, Google made an eight-pound prototype of a computer meant to be worn on the face.
"You're thinking, What are people going to need?" In 2011, largely thanks to advances in the miniaturization of technology, the answer seemed to be a wearable notification device paired to a phone — making it yet simpler to exchange messages of love, or tardiness.
The vívosmart also acts as a notification device for a connected smartphone, vibrating for incoming text, email, call, calendar reminders and more.
From the dozen or so other Android Wear devices already on sale there has only been one with GPS on-board, the Sony SmartWatch 3. The inclusion of GPS connectivity turns a smartwatch from a notification device into a fully fledged running assistant.
I still have questions about how much time people will actually spend navigating on-watch interfaces, vs. using it more as a passive monitoring and notification device, but Apple has done a lot of work providing genuine innovation for how users might think about exploring wearables that others to date haven't seemed to have put much thought into.
