Life Style Management using Wearable Computer

Wearable computers, embedded in clothing or seamlessly integrated in devices we carry with us, have a tremendous advantage to become the main gateway to personal health management. Current stateof-the-art devices allow to monitor basic physical or physiological parameters. Applications include e.g. improving performance in sports, early fall detection for elderly people, long-term heart monitoring in order to quantify recovery after surgery. Those devices however tend to focus on elementary physical or physiological aspects of health management. In this article we point out that future wearable device will need to take into considerations social as well as mental aspects in addition to physical and physiological information in order to deliver truly personalized, proactive, wearable health or life style management systems. We highlight open research topics that need to be addressed to make this vision a reality.