Towards a Toolkit for Free Living Wearable Development

Real-world Data collection and analysis is a significant pain point in wearable device development, requiring multidisciplinary skills in: embedded systems, application development, data science, and domain expert knowledge. In this work, we first build motivation based on previous experiences in wearable development, then introduce a toolkit for data collection and iterative development to reduce engineering efforts for free living experimentation of wearable devices. This toolkit utilizes Bluetooth Low Energy and an adaptive mobile application to help researchers quickly test new hardware, collect meaningful data, and assist in developing embedded algorithms with minimal intermediary code changes. We demonstrate the utility of our toolkit by collecting data in-the-wild from multiple sensors using a prototype wearable and a ground truth heart rate sensor. In addition, we demonstrate the toolkit’s capabilities with a baseline throughput test. Finally, we show how this tool has helped in early development of a new custom device. Our work is released as open source and welcomes contributions in an effort to broaden the tookit’s utility for the wearable research community.