From Our Archive: Wearable Computing, Long Before Google Glass

Will Knight

May 17, 2013

 

What was it like to use a wearable computer back in 1999?

If you’re interested in Google Glass, the Internet giant’s ingenious, terrifying, baffling (tick as appropriate), head-worn computer display (see “Treading Carefully, Google Encourages Developers to Hack Glass”), you might like to read a feature article that appeared in the pages of MIT Technology Review nearly fifteen years ago, which puts the project in some historical context.

The Impending Headache of Google Glass Apps

Jessica Leber

May 17, 2013

Glass apps will require people to create new content filters. Maybe that’s just a losing battle.

 
Glass office hours at Google I/O this week. Will these desks one day be as common as the Apple genius bar?
 

Would you want your daily horoscope beamed to your right eye? That’s the vision of the future I saw when I tried out the fashion magazine Elle’s app for Google Glass yesterday, one of several apps announced at the extravagant software developer love-fest the internet company puts on every year.

Smartphone Tracker Gives Doctors Remote Viewing Powers

Here’s the smartphone technology that alerts a doctor when patients are headed for trouble.

• By Tom Simonite on May 17, 2013

Why It Matters

Patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes could benefit if doctors had a way to tell when they stopped taking their medication.

Tracking you: The Ginger.io app tries to detect health changes by monitoring a person’s phone use.

At the Forsyth Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, nurses can see into the lives of some diabetes patients even when they’re not at the clinic. If a specific patient starts acting lethargic, or making lengthy calls to his mom, a green box representing him on an online dashboard turns yellow, then red. Soon, a nurse will call to see if he is still taking his medication.