Human Factors Considerations in the Design of Wearable Devices

TLDR

Wearable devices hold promise across medical, safety, leisure, and entertainment domains, yet most research focuses on technical feasibility while overlooking human factors that can reduce acceptance and sustained engagement. The study aims to promote human‑centered design by presenting a list of 20 principles for early‑stage wearable development. The authors describe how each principle can be integrated into the design process of wearable devices. Adopting these principles is expected to enhance user acceptance, satisfaction, and engagement with new wearable applications.

Abstract

Wearable devices have great potential to support several application domains ranging from medical and safety critical, to leisure and entertainment. Wearable devices’ solutions are promising, and extensive research has been conducted in this domain since the early 90’s. However most of these works focuses on the feasibility of individual solutions. As such, the human aspects are often neglected, which can decrease not only the acceptance levels for novel devices, but also their sustained engagement. To facilitate the consideration of human factors in the early design stage, we present and define a list of 20 human-centered design principles. We explain how each principle can be incorporated during the design phase of the wearable device creation process. By adopting these principles, we expect practitioners to achieve better wearable solutions, improving the user acceptance, satisfaction and engagement for novel applications.