Putting a Wearable Cloud in Your Jacket

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are exploring the concept of a wearable personal cloud in the form of a jacket. Using 10 Raspberry Pi boards, three power banks and a small remote touchscreen display, the duo of Dr. Ragib Hasan and Dr. Rasib Khan have developed a system that brings all mobile computing solutions together.

The cloud jacket could make the design of mobile and wearable devices simple, inexpensive and lightweight by allowing users to tap into the resources of the wearable cloud, instead of relying solely on the capabilities of their mobile hardware.

Currently if you want to have a smart watch, smartphone, an exercise tracker and smart glasses, you have to buy individual expensive devices that aren’t working together. Why not have a computational platform with you that can support many forms of mobile and wearable devices? Then all of these capabilities can become really inexpensive.

The prototype boasts roughly 10GB of RAM, in comparison to the one to three GB of a standard smartphone. Each Raspberry Pi within the jacket has 32GB of memory available for a total of 320GB.

What this means is that phones, watches, tablets and other gadgets would no longer need complex, powerful processors. They would be turned into “dumb terminal devices,” or controllers, to request services via user interactions. Nodes inside the jacket are engaged and compute the task collectively. Upon completion, the displayable result is sent back to the terminal device. The tasks are performed from the privately owned wearable cloud jacket, which also retains most, if not all, personal data.

Once you have turned everything else into a ‘dumb device,’ the wearable cloud becomes the smart one. The application paradigm becomes much more simple and brings everything together. Instead of individual solutions, now you have everything as a composite solution.

It should also be noted that, despite the prototype being a jacket, the concept goes well beyond just clothing. The model enables the personal cloud to extend to any item carried on a daily basis, from a coat to a briefcase, purse or backpack. Hasan and Khan believe this type of technology solution could aid in a variety of ways, from the way first responders communicate and share information during disasters to the way soldiers communicate on the battlefield.

You can read all about it on UAB’s website, and download the researchers’ paper here.