Hands-free Mobile System: Hardware Platforms for Wearable Computing

Our concept of Hands-free Mobile System is a speech-oriented client-server system based on short-range wireless communication. The client acts as a front-end user interface device but appears to have all the functions and intelligence of the server including voice-recognition and synthetic speech capability via its multi-modal user interface.
Through the prototyping of wearable computers and their visual systems, we started focusing on this concept and recently created the WatchPad as a wearable computing platform. This paper describes the concept and its hardware platform.