Human-Computer Interfaces for Wearable Computers: A Systematic Approach to Development and Evaluation

Abstract

The research presented in this thesis examines user interfaces for wearable computers.Wearable computers are a special kind of mobile computers that can be worn on the body. Furthermore, they integrate themselves even more seamlessly into different activities than a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant can.The thesis investigates the development and evaluation of user interfaces for wearable computers. In particular, it presents fundamental research results as well as supporting software tools for wearable user interface development. The main contributions of the thesis are a new evaluation method for user interfaces of wearable computers and a model-driven software toolkit to ease interface development for application developers with limited human-computer interaction knowledge.The research presented in this thesis motivates and validates the research hypothesis that user interfaces for wearable computers are inherently different to stationary desktop interfaces as well as mobile computer interfaces and, therefore, have to be designed differently to make them usable without being a burden for humans.