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Wearable devices are a popular class of portable ubiquitous technology. These devices are available in a variety of forms, ranging from smart glasses to smart rings. The fact that smart wearable devices are attached to the body makes them particularly suitable to be integrated into people’s daily lives. Thus, we propose that wearables can be particularly useful to help people make sense of different kinds of information and situations in the course of their everyday activities, in other words, to help support learning in everyday life. Further, different forms of wearables have different affordances leading to varying perceptions and preferences, depending on the purpose and context of use. While there is research on wearable use in the learning context, it is mostly limited to specific settings and usually only explores wearable use for a specific task. This paper presents an online survey with 70 participants conducted to understand users’ preferences and perceptions of how wearables may be used to support learning in their everyday life. Multiple ways of use of wearable for learning were proposed. Asking for information was the most common learning-oriented use. The smartwatch/wristband, followed by the smart glasses, was the most preferred wearable form factor to support learning. Our survey results also showed that the choice of wearable type to use for learning is associated with prior wearable experience and that perceived social influence of wearables decreases significantly with gain in the experience with a fitness tracker. Overall, our study indicates that wearable devices have untapped potential to be used for learning in daily life and different form factors are perceived to afford different functions and used for different purposes.
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Psychological Science Meets Wearable Cognitive Assistance
A wearable cognitive assistant (WCA) is a computer-based application that guides a user through a task with input from wearable devices with the aid of computational resources in nearby locations (cloudlets). Psychological science informs development of WCAs and is encountering new issues for research. We discuss three relevant research areas: response time, action segmentation, and task comprehension.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2106862
- PAR ID:
- 10442542
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 0963-7214
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 446-453
- Size(s):
- p. 446-453
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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