Can smartwatch help users save time by

making processes efficient and easier?

Final report – INF 5261 Autumn 2014

Dipesh Pradhan

Nugroho Sujatmiko

Department of Informatics

UNIVERSITETET I OSLO

18.11.2014

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Contents 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1

1.1 Background .................................................................................................................. 1

1.2 Motivation ................................................................................................................... 2

1.3 Research questions ...................................................................................................... 3

2 Method and audience ......................................................................................................... 3

2.1 Method ......................................................................................................................... 3

2.2 Target audience ............................................................................................................ 4

3 Preliminary research and analysis ...................................................................................... 4

3.1 Situational analysis: smartphone today ....................................................................... 4

3.2 Situational analysis: smartwatch today ........................................................................ 6

3.3 Android Wear .............................................................................................................. 8

4 Literature review ................................................................................................................ 9

5 Design considerations ...................................................................................................... 12

6 Case Studies ..................................................................................................................... 13

7 Result and Analysis .......................................................................................................... 17

8 Discussion ........................................................................................................................ 20

9 Conclusion and Future work ............................................................................................ 21

References ................................................................................................................................ 22

Appendices ............................................................................................................................... 24

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1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Though smartwatch has been commercially available since early 80’s, it has not gained much

publicity or interest from public consumer. However in the past one year, smartwatch has

gained significant momentum and 2013 was even said by analysts “could have been year-of-

the-smartwatch”. That momentum was signified by the release of several smartwatch

products such as Pebble by Pebble Technology Corp, Galaxy Gear S by Samsung,

SmartWatch by Sony and Toq by Qualcomm. Later in 2014, Consumer Electronic Shows a

large number of new smartwatches were released by various companies such as Razer Inc,

Archos, LG, Motorola, and even Google Android Wear platform was then introduced. That is

on top of what other firms have confirmed that they are in process of developing their

smartwatch products due for release in near future, such as Apple with Apple Watch and

Swatch with Swatch Touch to virtually concludes 2014 as start of “wrist revolution” where

many high-tech companies have started their competition in this market.

With that recent situation development, the big question is whether smartwatch will really get

its own positioning within public consumer product lines, considering there are many other

existing personal computing devices with various form factors and computing power such as

laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone, etc. What is the advantage of smartwatch compared to

others? Where should smartwatch fit within people daily activities? Will smartwatch be a real

killer-device with true tangible benefit rather than just a sci-fi hype?

This report is trying to explore what smartwatch can or should do in order to save people

time, by making some daily tasks processing easier and more efficient. One focus area is how

the “human-smartwatch” interaction should be designed in order to achieve that time-saving

objective. The design is based on what technology is available today as well as what has been

patented.

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1.2 Motivation

We have several motivations as to why we think smartwatch as people time-saver is an

interesting and relevant topic these days:

1. Ever increasing activities a person can have with limited time. People have considerable

more activities today than before. People tends to get more meetings, more appointments,

more information to digest, etc. Can it be helped or facilitated by smartwatch?

2. Emerging smartwatch products on the market from various vendors with various

capabilities. Smartwatch is no longer a sci-fi thing which we could only watch in sci-fi

movies, rather it has become a reality and it offers a lot more capabilities than what it did

when it was first commercially released in early 80’s. There are more choices available,

and it could become a commodity in near future like what smartphone has been today.

3. More demanding interactions driven by social/professional needs which are typically

performed using smartphone today. Smartphone has been human’s main ‘digital

companion’ in the past two decades that has helped people to be always connected in

mobile way and allows more interaction. But, will picking up phone form pocket be still

practical with more demanding people interaction e.g. if we get either one mail or one

SMS or one important news feed or one phone call every ten minutes, will picking up

from pocket still be fine or becoming cumbersome? Not to mention how many touch, tap

or slide we need to do to access that information resource from smartphone.

4. Promising various technologies and inventions/patents to overcome today’s smartwatch

shortcomings (e.g. battery charging over WiFi, GSM/3G mobile enabled smartwatch,

etc.). Smartwatch’s technological shortcomings have been one of barrier-to-use that

prevents smartwatch acceptance from public consumer –aside from its comparative cost.

But the recent technology advancements start closing the shortcomings as well as making

lower production cost.

5. Users do not use smartphones or tablet PCs constantly during everyday life for example

while eating, sleeping, shower, or just being at home, and they are not built for an outdoor

usage or rough environment. Furthermore, normal gloves cannot be used to operate

capacitive touch displays [1]. However, smartwatches have a battery life span a couple of

days to years, water resistant and the sensors to enable a possible gesture interaction. [2]

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Thus, smartwatch can be worn constantly in all different context when other devices may

not be viable.

1.3 Research questions

RQ 1: What activities take relatively long time to execute with smartphone today? e.g.

measured by how many manual steps including the number of touch/tap needed.

The purpose of this research question is to assess the current activities with the aims to

understand the domain, understand the case study and identify the problem to be solved.

RQ 2: Can smartwatch make the process more efficient (shorten the steps) and easier?

What kind of “human-to-smartwatch” interaction design could be done to exploit the

advantage of smartwatch compared to smartphone, with the caveat of smartwatch’s

shortcomings (e.g. shortcomings on screen size, computing power etc)?

This question helps us to understand if the problem identified by research question 1 can be

solved or minimized with smartwatch. Furthermore, this question help us to suggest the

changes required to exploit the advantages of smartwatches in regards to their shortcomings.

2 Method and audience

2.1 Method

We are going to do literature review (academic and theoretical point of view) on wearables in

general and smartwatch in particular. In addition to that, we are going to review articles and

market capabilities around existing smartwatch products on market today e.g. its capabilities

and consumer’s opinion/reception around its pros and cons. Furthermore, we will look at what

design principles that can be used as consideration. Finally, we will deep-dive on couple of

potential scenarios/case-studies such as notification management and appointment booking,

and do high level process design how it can be done.

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2.2 Target audience

The target audience for this project are busy people who has many activities and want to save

as much time as possible in interacting with the device.

Job workers (mid –senior level)

These are the people who are busy. They want to reduce the number of steps in any tasks so

they have more free time which they can use for themselves or do other tasks. Example could

be to schedule appointments. They have appointment both at work and private. They want to

be able to quickly schedule the meeting without any clashes and be reminded of them.

Furthermore, they want to schedule the appointment in as less steps as possible.

Students

These user groups of people want to use affordable state of the art technology and look

fashionable at the same time. They might want to use technology wherever they go and hence

a better choice of smartwatches which unlike smartphones and tablet can be carried anywhere

around. They also have busy schedule due to long school hours as well assignments and

personal lives. The young people between the ages of 18-34 also seem to be the majority of

wearables owners [3].

3 Preliminary research and analysis

3.1 Situational analysis: smartphone today

Today smartphone has been the main device that is attached to a person and making it the

most personal mobile device. Therefore the situational analysis is more focused to

smartphone as the baseline comparison, rather than desktop PC, laptop or tablet.

1. Notification management: how many times do we need to pick our phones?

In a single day someone can get many notifications electronically. It can be in many

forms depending on the phone’s capability including SMS, email, messaging service

(e.g. Facebook message, Whatsapp message, Blackberry message) and traditional

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incoming phone call. A US phone user aged 18 - 24 receives 1831 SMS monthly or 61

SMS daily [4]. A business user receives in average 75 legitimate emails daily [5]. A

Whatsapp user typically gets 2267 messages monthly or 75 messages daily [6].

Excluding number of phone call, based on the numbers above, someone could get over

200 notifications daily. Another analysis by Ahonen based on Nokia’s study mentions

in average people checks the smartphone 150 times daily [7]. As we don’t carry phone

by hands most of the time, that implies a person may need to pick up the phone as

many as 150 times, and also put it back to at the same number of times after usage, be

it out from pocket, bag, desk or from anywhere else. It could have been easier if we get

notification on something that is wearable so we can have a quick look to decide

whether we should respond by picking up the phone or not.

2. Smartphone: how many step is required to do things?

Given the phone has been picked out from pocket and now is on hands, a person still

needs to do some steps. Typically the steps are:

o Unlocking the phone. While in pocket, a phone is typically screen-locked to

avoid unwanted use. Unlocking requires several taps or slides.

o Finding app. A person typically has number of apps that is more than one

phone screen can hold and therefore apps icons are placed in multiple home-

screens. Hence finding the apps required another one or two taps or slides.

o Running the app itself. This may vary based on how easy the app’s user

interface is, but it definitely needs more than just two taps.

With the number of steps above, in a mobile situation such as while driving, cycling,

walking or running, the use of phone is not a convenient thing, time taking and could

be even unsafe.

3. There is other time-taking aspects that people may see as disadvantage of smartphone.

Smartphone is mobile but we need to carry, which implies while we are not carrying

it, there could be a chance that we forget where we place the phone. Hence finding or

searching for the misplaced phone is another time-taking exercise, compared to

wearing thing.

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4. There are some other non-time-saving disadvantage aspects of smartphone compared

to wearable such as potential of getting pick-pocketed (from bag, pocket, purse),

relatively heavier and bigger dimension so not everyone pocket may fits, etc. However

we do not discuss non time-saving aspect in this report.

3.2 Situational analysis: smartwatch today

There are various smartwatch products in the market offering various capabilities and prices.1

Following are the smartwatch’s barrier-to-use factors perceived by consumer:

1. Price. It typically costs more than smartphone, though today we can find smartwatch at

less than $99 price tag such as Sony LiveView.

2. Feature. This may vary from one product to another but in general it can be classified into

the following:

o Battery life. Today it ranges from 1 to 7 days (could be a year for special purpose

smartwatch), which is actually fairly comparable to smartphone, but would not be

comparable to traditional watch.

o Computing power. It is definitely behind smartphone but actually smartwatch

today has been equivalent to earlier smartwatch, such as Samsung Gear-2 with

1GHz dual-core processor.

o Screen size. It is inherited limitation of watch form factor which cannot be much

improved but could be helped with better user interface design.

o Connectivity. In general it is more limited compared to smartphone and may

position smartwatch as peripheral/accessories to smartphone.

o Apps. Due to its form factor, the number of apps is more limited.

o Size/style. It is sometimes too bulky or not stylish enough i.e. makes the user looks

geeky/nerdy.

1 http://www.bestsmartwatchescompared.com/

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There are new inventions which could be applicable to smartwatch:

1. Battery charging over wireless

This technology enables smartwatch’s battery to be charged while user is still wearing it

and still mobile. Today there has been three consortiums competing to become the

standard protocol:

Power Matter Alliance (AT&T, Duracell Powermat, HTC, Huawei, Kyocera, LG,

NEC, Power Kiss, Samsung, Sharp, Starbucks, ZTE etc.)

Wireless Power Consortium (Belkin, Energizer, HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, NEC,

Nokia, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Verizon etc.)

Alliance for Wireless Power (Deutsche Telekom, HTC, Intel, LG, Qualcomm,

Samsung, SanDisk etc.)

2. Bluetooth LE or Bluetooth Smart

It is a wireless personal area network technology to provide considerably reduced power

consumption and cost while maintaining a similar communication range to conventional

Bluetooth, therefore it is perfect for smartwatch connectivity solution.

3. 3G GSM connectivity

In the early days, smartwatch was seen more as peripheral to smartphone as it did not

have its own GSM connectivity. But today we have seen Samsung Gear-S has 3G GSM

connectivity and likely will be followed by others. That allows smartwatch to completely

replace smartphone for calling.

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3.3 Android Wear

Google developed Android Wear which extends Android platform with a user experience

that's designed specifically for wearables. The key aspects are glanceable/actionable

information at the right time, exploits voice command to interact with the device and

accessibility to wide range of sensors attached to the wearable.

Main Android Wear visions are as follows [8]:

Focus on not stopping the user. Operating the Android Wear app should demand less user

attention and user should be able to continue doing his primary activity in parallel. This

highlights glance ability and minimal attention user interface aspect.

Zero or low interaction. Most inputs are based around touch swipes or voice, and inputs

requiring fine-grained finger movements are avoided. Visual interaction should not

demand precision e.g. use only few menus at once and large touch targets.

Figure below shows sample how voice command is used in interaction programmatically.

Suggest/display right content just when the user needs it. Sensors should be utilized to

exploit the user’s context (time, location, activity, weather, user schedule etc.) and display

relevant information only.

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4 Literature review

We will look at various literatures to better understand the solution to the problem, and find

the best solution. We plan to use the suggested ideas by various scholars in our design.

Smartwatch barrier-to-use

The paper by Song studies the reason why consumers do not buy wearable devices and what

is the ideal product they are willing to buy and wear. It uses different researches example ABI

research, Forrester research, Nielsen and so on, and also looks at the problem from the

customer viewpoint. It states that for majority of consumers to buy smart devices they look

for three parts: function expectation (a good smartwatch which might replace smartphone);

design expectation; and product system. [3] Therefore, the smartwatch need to have good

functionality, look stylish and a good product line for the customers to relate to.

Smartwatch context awareness

Tamminen et al. 2004 studies mobile contexts as they differ from fixed indoor contexts. Both

internal factors such as tasks and goals along are different along with external factors such as

social resources are dynamic and unpredictable. [9] Studies have already shown that

smartwatch application can perform common actions in an office environment without losing

too much time. [10] Therefore, the users can use their smartwatch to replace different physical

application with their smartwatch. Perhaps this feature can be extended.

Smartwatch input modality

There are several types of input modality. Physical touch or tap to the smartwatch button or

screen menu has been widely used today, similar to how we operate smartphone. The physical

touch is a response from visual output shown on screen. However due to smartwatch small

screen size, it is important to consider other input modality which is “eyes-free”. Such “eyes-

free” interaction is also aimed at reducing visual focus attention requirement from user,

allowing more usage while in mobile/moving condition.

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Perrault et al., 2013 looks at how wristband can be used for solving the visual occlusion and

the fat finger problem in the wristwatch due to their screen size. It also investigates the usage

of wristband for eyes-free contexts and presents techniques where the bracelet can be used

together with the screen to provide precise continuous control over list scrolling. Gesture

based interaction seemed to be faster than using a touch screen in few conditions by the result

of their experiment. [11]

Kyu Yeol Paik [12] highlights that gesture can be other considerable input modality. However

it was argued that gesture is quite limited in numbers, can be unnatural, may consume user’s

focus, and has quite margin of gesture detection inaccuracy. Audio/sound is another possible

input modality, with some challenges around recognition of personal accent difference and

surrounding noise. The computing power of smartwatch was also seen as limited to do

complex speech recognition.

Smartwatch output modality

Screen/visual output has been the default modality for many mobile devices. Kyu [12]

mentions there are several other possible output modal namely audio and

haptic/tactile/vibration. [12] Audio output modality includes auditory icon (symbolic

methaphore of event), earcon (pre-defined tone output) a natural audio speech.

Smartwatch interactions with other mobile devices

Rhodes et al. 1999 looks at the advantages and disadvantages of ubiquitous computing and

wearable computing. Then the author proposes the complementary problems for the two

perspectives. And finally, the author attempts to demonstrate that the failing of both

ubiquitous and wearable computing can be alleviated by the development of systems that mix

the two. The author proposes the use of peer-to-peer network of wearable and ubiquitous

computing components, with proper information flow to solve the disadvantages of

wearables. [13] Therefore, we could have the smartwatch react with the environment for

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example with the smart room where a room with multiple sensors work together with

smartwatch settings of multiple individuals.

Chen et al. 2014 explores input modality that combines smartwatch gesture with smartphone

spatial context to create new multi-device input interaction. Such new gesture-based

interactions are claimed to be useful & increases easiness compared to conventional way of

doing it in following aspects: reduces cumbersome steps if they were done using smart phone

alone, provides extended display on screen (i.e. the new interaction removes the necessity to

have extra icon/button so freeing more screen space on smart phone), allow extra interaction

capabilities beyond their individuals. [14]

Kevin et al. 2008 looks at how users can do other activities like checking calendar while in a

phone call without interrupting the call. The author replaces the visual interface of mobile

phone with one based on auditory feedback where the users interact using the phone keypad

without looking at the screen. Then it is presented for the users to test it where the majority of

them preferred this method.[15] Therefore, it is worthy taking note that other input methods

might be better.

Minimal Attention User Interface (MAUI)

Pascoe et al [16] examines the nature of fieldwork and its inherent mobility, presents the

prototype fieldwork tools (in ecology) and discusses “minimal-attention user interfaces”

(MAUI) & “context awareness” principles. The context of the problem statement is on field

work, whereby the following user characteristics are featured:

Dynamic User Configuration: collect data whenever and wherever they need

Limited Attention Capacity: spend most of time in observing and not in interacting with

the recording mechanism

High-Speed Interaction: highly animated observation object or sudden/intense activity

Context Dependency: the activities are closely associated with fieldworker/subject’s

context e.g. observation location

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MAUI aims to minimize demand of visual attention in operating the device. It suggests eyes-

free interaction, which can be either tactile based or audio based, which best suit is depending

on activity characteristics.

Universal design

Ornella et al [16] looks at how mobile phone should be universally designed. Using a user-

centered design process, they tried to integrate visually-impaired, hearing-impaired and

elderly peoples’ needs to design mock-ups adapted in terms of usability and design style. It

was not only looking at usability aspect but also the image of the product, in order to make

them acceptable in social environment (i.e. avoid disability discrimination). The user-centric

design process starts with analysis of user-needs, which consists of analysis of existing

product, usability & trend analysis and design specification. Afterwards, the user needs must

be interpreted, which involves some creativities, evaluation and selection of new concept, as

well as mock-up design. The last step would be evaluation.

5 Design considerations

The generic considerations is that the smartwatch interaction should be natural, simple and

easy-to-use, which translates to the following design considerations:

1. Explore alternative input method in addition to screen touch to compensate limitation

of smartwatch form factor. Input modality can be gesture based, voice based,

peripheral based (input on wristband, watch bracelet, programmable button) etc.

Literature base: Perrault suggests gesture-based bracelet [11], Paik suggests gesture

and audio [12] , Chen suggests gesture sensor input [14] , Bieber suggests gesture

sensor, tactile feedback, acoustic interface [2] , Sawhney suggests audio [11],

AndroidWear suggests cue-card [18].

2. Minimize eyes-interaction demand for output modality. Focusing eyes on small screen

could be tiring, especially on too dark or too light environment or while on mobile

situation (e.g. driving, walking). Other output interaction should be explored (e.g.

audio).

Literature base: Paik suggests audio/voice, haptic [12], Sawhney suggests audio [17] ,

Pascoe suggests minimal attention UI /MAUI approach [18].

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3. Simplify UI by minimizing number of menus/steps required to execute smartwatch

function. Though we do not need to pick it out from pocket, it will not save time if the

total number of steps is still more or equal than smartphone’s steps today.

Literature base: Android Wear suggests zero or low interaction [18].

4. Explore possibilities to link smartwatch to other device for the smart homes for

example lock-unlock doors (cars, lockers, etc).

Literature base: Bernaerts proposes smart watch to support & augment office

interactions eg. lock/unlock doors, acquire room, virtual knock[10], Chen proposes

joint interaction of smartwatch and smartphone to simplify smartphone usage [14].

5. Explore context-awareness capability with smartwatch.

Literature base : Pascoe suggests context-awareness to automatically discover and

offer resources to the user based on their current environment [18, 19], AndroidWear

promotes vision to provide right-information at just right time e.g. suggest vs demand

concept based on context [18].

6 Case Studies

This section briefly highlights the scenarios where smartwatch could possibly help saving

users’ time.

1. Notification management

Smartwatch can be made smart to classify which incoming information is important vs

not-so-important and output different type of notification to user based on rules. When

used in pair with smartphone, user can decide whether or not to pick up the phone from

pocket based on notification tone, hence saving time.

High level interaction design:

input:

o incoming phone call, SMS, messaging service (e.g. Whatsapp message, BBM,

Facebook message etc.)

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o Configurable notification setting based on sender information, message

subject, message content, user’s context such as current time, current location,

current activity based on schedule etc.

output : different type of notification based on the importance and user’s context

Figure 1. How smartwatch can help users save time by notification based on importance or user’s context

The input can be anything as seen in the figure above. We will have a set of rules in the

smartwatch that will help filter the important input from the unimportant inputs. The rules

could be anything for example like user defined rules at Microsoft Outlook to filter out the

emails or algorithm to prioritize the inputs. It can be based on sender phone number,

sender email address, email subject, certain text contained in instant message and so on.

The rules can be based on user’s context as well. For example, when smartwatch detects

user’s location is at home and user’s time is after working-hours, it can activate rule to

silent notification of incoming SMS/email from office. Because user may not want to be

bothered with work related message at home. Instead it will activate rule to amplify

notification of incoming SMS/email from family and friends only.

Another example of context awareness, when smartwatch detects the user’s current

activity is presenting/on-meeting based on calendar, it can activate rule to silent

notification from any phone call/SMS/email, unless it comes from anyone invited to the

presentation/meeting itself.

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2. Appointment making/reminding

Smartwatch may allow appointment making by voice command and synchronizing it

with calendar with audio and/or haptic output reminder. It save times than making

appointment in smartphone by touch interaction.

High level interaction design:

input: predefined set of voice commands and user’s calendar

output :

Appointment set up and synchronized with user’s calendar if there is no conflict.

Whenever appointment is almost due, smartwatch will provide audio/haptic

reminder.

Audio response to warn user if there is conflict with existing appointment in the

calendar. The new appointment can still be set up upon user confirmation to

override the conflict.

The following diagram shows how the user can book an appointment with his/her

smartwatch.

Figure 2. Diagram showing how appointment can be easily booked with voice

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3. Sending and receiving SMS/email

Smartwatch to allow voice-to-text to send SMS/email i.e. sending SMS/email by

“saying”. Also allow text-to-voice to read the SMS/email for the user, allowing touch-

free and eyes-free interaction i.e. receiving SMS/email by “hearing”.

High level interaction design:

input :

o Predefined set of voice commands to send/get the SMS/email

o User’s speech that will be transcribed into SMS text or email message.

output :

o SMS/email sent without touching smartwatch

o SMS/email message heard by user without touching smartwatch

Figure 3. How interactions for reading and sending sms /email can be performed by using voice

For the same second scenario, smartphones would need the following steps:

1. Unlock the phone

2. Find email/SMS app

3. Open the app

4. In case of sending message we need to choose the message recipient

5. Read or write the message

Input Interaction Design /How Output

Step-1 Step-2 Step-3

Need to

SMS/email

Activate "audio-

interaction"

function

Say "Read

SMS" Hear SMS audio

Say "Write

SMS" Dictate the SMS content

Say "Read

Email" Hear email audio

Say "Write

Email" Dictate the Email content

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6. Send message

As seen above, the same process can be done much faster with the voice command

through the smart watch, and thus, it helps the user save time.

7 Result and Analysis

In this section, we perform result and analysis for each research questions mentioned in 1.3

A. Research Question 1

We look at the number of steps required to perform a simple activity (checking out

notifications) at smartphone. We consider two scenarios to read notifications for SMS and

email: a) Without rules and b) With rules to manage the notification of the SMS and

emails.

For SMS or email following steps need to be performed to check out the message:

1. Take out smartphone from the pocket.

2. Unlock the smartphone.

3. See the notification icon in screen.

4. Click on the notification to open the message or email.

5. Read the message.

6. Close the message.

The number of step required to read just one message may not be significant, but when we

get multiple messages in a day, the total number of steps can be simply overwhelming. As

background to base out the analysis, a US phone user aged 18 - 24 receives 1831 SMS

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monthly or 61 SMS daily [4]. A business user receives in average 75 legitimate emails

daily [5]. If there is no filter mechanism, and we assume that the user checks out his/her

smartphone each time he/she gets notification, then he/she needs to perform roughly 366

steps to check out all the 61 SMS and 450 steps for 75 emails that the business user

receives each day.

However, if we have some rules to filter out the messages then in the best case scenarios if

we assume that only 10% of the input are relevant then still a user would need to spend 36

steps a day to check out 6 SMS or 42 steps a day to check out 7 emails a day. Similarly, if

we consider that only 50% of the messages are relevant then we would need 186 steps for

31 SMS and 228 steps for the 38 emails. That is awfully many steps to perform which we

believe can be shortened with the help of the smartwatch.

B. Research Question 2

To answer the RQ2, we look at the number of steps required to perform the same activity

done with smartwatch at RQ1, and we compare the required number of steps. To exploit

the advantage of smartwatch, we use the two principles suggested by Jason Pascoe et al,

2000: Minimal Attention user Interface (MAUI) and Context Awareness. [18]

Let us look at the number of steps we would require to read notification in the smartwatch

using our suggested design considerations:

1. Get notification for relevant message at the smartwatch by vibration and ringtone.

2. Check out the message.

3. Close the message.

We only need 3 steps to perform the same task to check out the notification using the

smartwatch. If we consider the same scenario as in smartwatch then we would compare

the needed steps between smartwatch and smartphone as follows:

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Table 1. Comparison of number of steps using smartwatch and smartphone with/without rules

(with the assumption user gets 61 SMS and 75 emails per day)

Tasks Smartwatch Smartphone with rules

Smartphone without rules

Steps saved with smartwatch

One task- SMS or email 3 6 6 4

61 SMS in one day (Worst scenario)- 100% 183 366 366 183

61 SMS in one day (Medium scenario)- 50% : 31 SMS 93 186 366 93

61 SMS in one day (Best scenario)- 10%: 6 SMS 18 36 366 18

75 Email SMS in one day (Worst scenario)- 100% 225 450 450 225

75 Email SMS in one day (Medium scenario)- 50%:38 114 228 450 114

75 Email in one day (Best scenario)-10%: 8 Email 24 48 450 24

As we can see in Table 1, using smartwatch can save us many unwanted steps. We can

also use context awareness principle in the smartwatch to make it intelligent to filter out

the important notification with the unimportant ones which can further help us remove

unwanted steps. Context awareness can be used for example if the user never sees any

message on Saturday between 13:00-14:00, we can provide notification later. Similarly,

the user might not have set any rule but the user might tend to ignore certain message

which the smartwatch would be able to figure out by itself after analyzing some patterns.

Furthermore, we use MAUI principle that is minimize eye interaction and use other input

method such as voice for various apps. For example, we can use voice to book

appointments as shown as the section Error! Reference source not found.. In this way,

these tasks can be performed when the user is moving or doing something else. The action

performed with the smartwatch like booking appointment is secondary compared to other

activity they are doing for example running.

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8 Discussion

We used our own experience to calculate the number of steps to do the tasks by ourselves. We

calculated the number of device using an Android based device. This might be different for

users with iOS, Windows based device or other operating system (OS). We used Android

based device because it is the most used operating system in the world so we can cover more

user. This might be perceived differently by different people using different OS or different

third party application. Other thing to consider is that we do not have the actual smartwatch to

calculate the number of steps and we are using literature and market review to suggest the

optimal device.

Additionally, our proposed interaction design using voice for example may not be applicable

for all the smartwatches in the market for example smartwatch without microphone or

speaker. Similarly, if the smartwatch does not support programmable rules or is not context

aware, our suggestion design would not work. Moreover, our suggested design is based on

using Android wear as the platform for the smartwatch, so it might not work in other

platforms.

Aside from three case studies above, smartwatch has many other possibilities in saving user

time for example (but not limited to):

“turn-by-turn” navigation

Pre-programmable/scriptable task (e.g. making call to favorite pizza store) which is

tagged to certain audio-command. It saves time than finding contact number and placing

normal call.

Making personal foreign language translator which takes audio input and provide audio

output and vice-versa. This can save time when we are in foreign country and needs to

understand some conversations without having to bring dictionary/language translation

book.

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Finally, applying universal design into smartwatch can be tricky as with small form factor it

may not be naturally suitable for visually impaired or elderly people. However smartwatch

has audio and haptic modality that still can be used for such users. In any case, reducing

dependency on visual modality is very much suggested in many literatures as visual is not

suitable for highly mobile/moving and busy users, the audience where the smartwatch is

targeted for. Whereas for deaf people, smartwatch visual and haptic modality will still work

for them.

9 Conclusion and Future work

We looked at some of the tasks that take long time to execute which we believe can be

improved with smartwatch. Smartwatch has a lot of capabilities, and it can make many tasks

much efficient and easier than smartphones. The time saved in each task might not look a lot

but all this time adds up. However, smartphone has its own shortcomings for example the

barriers that we looked at above 3.2. If these barriers are overcome, we see a huge potential

for smartwatch in the future as an additional accessory item along with smart phone or as a

standalone device.

The next step to look at would be to see if smartwatch are cost effective in comparison to the

benefits they provide. It is also important to look at what features would attract consumer to

buy smartwatches. Those factors would be the tipping point of smartwatch usage popularity.

Otherwise smartwatch can be just a technically very good product but no one wants to own.

We may need a market research, for example survey or interview, to perceive consumer

needs/desire and identify the maximum cost that consumer can accept.

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Appendices

We conducted a survey to see the market for smartwatches. We asked 4 multi choice

questions and 1 question with their opinion to 40 people, and here are our results for the

different questions:

1. What don’t you like about smartphones?

2. What will make you buy smartwatch?

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3. What are your expectations with smartwatch?

4. Which interaction method do you want for smartwatch?

5. What feature would you like to have in smartwatch (Any feature you can think of and

that might not be present today)?

There were different answers for this question like hologram, camera, alarm based on physical

movement that. i.e. stronger than just vibrating, functionality as foreign language translator,

GPS, pokedex, VR, water resistant, blood control/lock-unlock doors(cars,lockers, etc) and

emergency button so people can find you.