Customisable wearables: exploring the design space of wearable technology

This paper explores the design space of wearable technology from the customisation point of view. We identify emerging customisation practices and customisable attributes from previous work in research and in a dataset of 129 commercial wearable devices. We distinguish between attributes on functional customisation, interaction techniques, location on the body, and appearance. While people have a variety of conventional clothing and accessories options to fulfil their personal preferences and lifestyle, this is a lot less for wearable devices. The commercial wearables still cluster around few use cases, especially fitness, and wrist-worn form factors.