A Watch Smarter Than You

By Roland Piquepaille

Computer scientists from the University of Washington (UW) have built a working prototype of a 'smart watch' that warns you if you forget your wallet or your keys when leaving home. The system is based on RFID tags attached to your car keys or your cell phone while RFID readers are installed in your home or your office. When an object is pinged by a reader, the information is transmitted to a personal server that you carry in your pockets. If the server 'thinks' that you're missing an important object, it tells the watch to alert you. Now the team wants to add a wireless location system to the personal server to improve its decision-making process. It seems useful, but what happens if you forget the server?

Here are the opening paragraphs of this news release.

In the not-so-distant future, your wristwatch could stop you if you try to run out the door without the necessities you need for the day, like your keys, wallet or cell phone.

At work, it could prompt you for important items needed for a meeting or a business lunch. In an academic setting, it could remind students which books to take as they hurry out the door for class.

Think of it as a technological string around the finger -- one that's smart enough to take the initiative to save you from the inconvenience and embarrassment of forgotten essentials.

Gaetano Borriello, who designed the working prototype, is also a specialist of ubiquitous computing. Here is how his 'smart watch' system works.

The basis of the system is small electronic labels called radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. The tags consist of an electronic circuit, antenna and memory chip. When pinged by a radio signal, they answer with an ID code identifying the tagged object.

The UW smart watch system equips users with a wristwatch that acts as an interface, driven by a small personal server that the wearer can easily carry in a pocket but which will eventually be part of the wristwatch itself. Important items are labeled with RFID tags and RFID readers are installed at various locations -- home, car and work, for instance -- to read the tags.

When the person passes a reader, the reader pings the tags and the ID information is broadcast locally to the user's personal server, which processes it and checks to see that all critical items are present. The server also takes into account the last known location of items, the user's calendar and where the user may be going. If the server finds that an item is missing and will be needed, it signals the watch to prompt the wearer.

Here is a picture of "a user walking through a doorway with several tagged objects. An RFID reader is visible on the left (white box on black stand); tags are visible on the notebooks in his hand; his personal server is in his front left pants pocket; and, our wristwatch UI is on his left wrist." (Credit: University of Washington)

And what's next?

The next steps include integrating a wireless location system into the server so it can determine where users are at any given time and whether they are arriving or leaving, and factor that into decision-making. In addition, the group is pursuing funding to turn the UW's Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering into a test building for the system.

"This is really part of a larger effort to create an RFID-enabled building, a sort of microcosm of what society would be like if these things take off," Borriello said, adding that the hope is to have a building-wide system up and running within a year. "We would have about 1,000 people using it and get a better understanding of what the future will bring while we still have a chance to do something about it. We want to explore not only how these systems would work, but also social issues like privacy implications."

Borriello and his colleagues presented a research paper named "Reminding about Tagged Objects using Passive RFIDs" at UbiComp 2004, which was held on September 7-10, 2004, in Nottingham, England. Here are two links to the abstract and the full paper (PDF format, 18 pages, 343 KB). The above illustration was extracted from this paper.

Sources: University of Washington news release, via EurekAlert!, October 6, 2004; and various other websites