Smart watches, head-mounted displays, and wearable devices for tracking and promoting health and fitness and other applications are becoming common. These devices range from special purpose sensors to fully functional computing platforms, with user interfaces that cover the spectrum from those with no on-device interface to interactive displays, sound systems, and new methods of communicating between device and user. Compared to past wearable computers, this plethora of devices may be more successful through exploiting lower-power processors and sensors, efficient networks, smaller components, more powerful supporting infrastructure, and higher consumer fascination with mobile, perhaps even fashionable, gadgets.

This special issue aims to explore the many challenges and purposes for wearable computing. For example, what are the best interfaces for devices without traditional displays? There are many obstacles to high user acceptance and compliance for health-related wearables, ranging from timely but unobtrusive information on head-mounted displays to the implications of social interactions when everyone becomes part of the Internet of Things. How do we protect the wearer's privacy and the privacy of the innocent bystanders who happen to encounter the wearer? What sensing, computation and storage should happen on-board the device, and what should happen instead in the supporting infrastructure? How do we design that infrastructure? What are the lessons we can learn from current and past deployments of wearable devices in industry or the military?

We invite original and high-quality submissions addressing all aspects of this field, as long as the connection to the focus topic is clear and emphasized. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Infrastructural support for wearable computing
- Context sensing through wearable devices
- Wearable computing for health and safety
- Manufacturing, industrial, and military applications of wearable devices
- Software platforms for wearable computing
- Novel user interfaces for interacting with wearable devices
- Social implications for wearable computing
- Ergonomic issues related to wearable devices
- Privacy and security related to wearable computing and the people who utilize the technology
- Retrospectives on past wearable projects and products
- Software architectures for wearable computing
- Power generation and management
- Display technology for wearable computing
- Using wearable computing for collaboration
- Surveys of the field

Special Issue Guest Editors

- Mary Baker, HP Labs
- Mark Billinghurst, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
- Jason Hong, Carnegie Mellon University

Submission Information

Submissions should be 4,000 to 6,000 words long and should follow the magazine's guidelines on style and presentation. All submissions will be single-blind anonymously reviewed in accordance with normal practice for scientific publications. For more information, contact the guest editors at pvc4-2014@computer.org.

To present works-in-progress directly to the community, visit our Reddit community: http://reddit.com/r/pervasivecomputing.

For general author guidelines or submission details: http://computer.org/pervasive/author.htm or pervasive@computer.org. To submit your article directly to our online peer-review system, go directly to Manuscript Central: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/pc-cs.