A Survey of Wearable Devices and Challenges

TLDR

Wearable mobile devices are increasingly popular, offering continuous physiological sensing while demanding improved communication security and power efficiency. This survey classifies commercial and prototype wearables, reviews security challenges and power‑saving techniques, surveys related research, and outlines future directions. The authors systematically review available wearables, analyze security and power‑efficiency methods, and synthesize findings from the literature.

Abstract

As smartphone penetration saturates, we are witnessing a new trend in personal mobile devices-wearable mobile devices or simply wearables as it is often called. Wearables come in many different forms and flavors targeting different accessories and clothing that people wear. Although small in size, they are often expected to continuously sense, collect, and upload various physiological data to improve quality of life. These requirements put significant demand on improving communication security and reducing power consumption of the system, fueling new research in these areas. In this paper, we first provide a comprehensive survey and classification of commercially available wearables and research prototypes. We then examine the communication security issues facing the popular wearables followed by a survey of solutions studied in the literature. We also categorize and explain the techniques for improving the power efficiency of wearables. Next, we survey the research literature in wearable computing. We conclude with future directions in wearable market and research.