ORIGINAL ARTICLE The case for reconfigurable hardware in wearable computing

Abstract Wearable computers are embedded into the mobile environment of their users. A design challenge for wearable systems is to combine the high performance required for tasks such as video decoding with the low energy consumption required to maximise battery run-times and the flexibility demanded by the dynamics of the environment and the applications. In this paper, we demonstrate that reconfigurable hardware technology is able to answer this challenge. We present the concept and the prototype implementation of an autonomous wearable unit with reconfigurable modules (WURM). We discuss experiments that show the uses of reconfig-urable hardware in WURM: ASICs-on-demand and adaptive interfaces. Finally, we present an experiment with an operating system layer for WURM