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A developer’s eye on smart glasses
In a Horizon 2020 project led by a major eyewear company, an advanced smart glasses product was developed that supports users in their daily activities. Consortium member Alten describes the main technical challenges and explains how they were solved.
What if your glasses were to monitor your environment and support you in your behavior? This type of smart glasses has been developed in a project as part of the European Horizon 2020 program. The sensors and electronics inside the glasses allow the wearer to monitor their activity and exposure to light, leading to a healthier and happier life. The European consortium was led by one of the major companies in the eyewear industry. Alten developed the entire software chain: firmware, algorithms, mobile applications, cloud storage and data analysis.
Several quality requirements apply to such a product. First, the measurements must be precise and consistent to gain user trust. In addition, changes in the environment or behavior need to be processed quickly for minimal latency. Second, the energy consumption must be low, so that it’s possible to wear the glasses for at least a full day before having to charge the batteries. Third, memory usage must be low to keep the hardware costs at a minimum. Finally, personal data must be secured and only accessible to entitled stakeholders. Based on these requirements, an IoT architecture was established for the product, consisting of the smart glasses with firmware, a smartphone with an app for the user and a cloud environment for data storage and processing.