Smart wearables create Patina Engravings to log performance

The Patina Engraving System is a novel activity log visualizer for smart wearables, such as smart watches or activity trackers that displays data in the form of a permanently engraved patina.

Article  |  Fall 2015

Recently, there has been a proliferation of commercial activity trackers for monitoring physical activity related to health and well-being; examples include Jawbone UP and Fitbit. Smart watches are also used as activity trackers. Most of these smart wearables collect an activity log that assists users to reflect on their lives by visualizing the data in mobile or web applications. However, one of the important aspects of activity trackers is that they are personal fashion items that play roles in personal identity, visual aesthetics, and social communication that go beyond technological features. Considering the way that activity trackers are worn daily, it is especially important to investigate how they can be improved as fashion items.

By incorporating the expertise of HCI, fashion, and product design, professor Tek-Jin Nam’s research team (led by two researchers, Moon-Hwan Lee and Seijin Cha) made use of the characteristics of patinas to improve activity trackers as fashionable wearables. It is known that artists and designers often use patinas as a design resource for constructing aesthetic properties, lending credibility to an object or bestowing a “warm” feeling through art or product design. For similar purposes, the research team applied the concept of a patina for designing activity tracking systems to improve the tracking experience of those who wear trackers to monitor activity.

The Patina Engraving System, which includes the Patina Engraver and Patina Tracker, engraves patina-like patterns on the wristband of activity trackers, thereby visualizing users’ accumulated activity logs. Accordingly, the appearance of the trackers changes along with the users’ tracking experience. Through field testing, it was found that the patina motivated people to exercise more in order to engrave aesthetic patinas. A tracker with patinas triggered spontaneous social interactions in face-to-face situations. The participants of the field testing also cherished the trackers that held their own histories. This research will inspire designs for diverse tracking devices and services, as well as general fashion and product designs.

The development of the Patina Engraving System and the user study guide the enhancement of emotional satisfaction for smart wearables. This work received the Best Paper Award in the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) CHI 2015 conference, which is the flagship conference for SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction). This award was given to the top 1% of all technical submission to CHI 2015. This marked the first time that authors from an Asian institution had ever received the award. This award shows the excellence of KAIST’s design-driven interdisciplinary research in the field of design and Human Computer Interaction.