Wearable Technology: Protection at the Intersection of Privacy, Security, and Usability

Constantly attached to your body or clothing, wearable devices offer a plethora of new data availability for collection. However, critical emerging threats to user security and privacy accompany this new source of data. These devices now regularly transmit sensitive data such as heart rate, blood pressure, and location over the internet to third parties directly from the user's sleeve. Developers and designers of wearable devices must consider security, privacy, and usability to allow users to make safe and informed decisions about the privacy of their data. We conducted this research to provide developers with information about how users perceive their own privacy, exposure to potential security issues, and understanding of which wearable device usability factors are most impactful. To achieve this goal, we conducted a study with human subjects to access their perception of privacy and measure their usability concerns after using a wearable for seven days. Additionally, we wrote an application for a popular wearable device platform to demonstrate several security and usability issues that need to be addressed by wearable designers and application developers. In this paper, we introduce related works in this area, provide motivation for investigating this problem, describe the design of both the privacy and usability study as well as the application developed to reveal wearable security flaws. We conclude by providing analysis of the data collected in the study, offering recommendations for future wearable design and development, and discussing future work to be done in the area. In this paper, we introduce related works in this area, provide motivation for investigating this problem, describe the design of both the privacy and usability study as well as the application developed to reveal wearable security flaws. We conclude by providing analysis of the data collected in the study, offering recommendations for future wearable design and development, discussing future work to be done in this area.U of I OnlyUndergraduate senior thesis not recommended for open access