Babak Amir Parviz is professor at the University in Washington and we at Wearable Technologies started following in 2009 when we first read his article on Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens published in the ieee spectrum. Furthermore, he is involved in a joint project between his University and Microsoft Research focusing on non-invasive blood glucose monitoring via a contact lens. Currently, he is also one of the project leaders at Google’s Project Glass next to Google X lead Product Manager, Steve Lee, and Stanford Research Professor and founder and head of Google X, Sebastian Thrun. We are really pleased that this busy gentleman agreed to a short interview with us.
1. What is your experience in wearable technology, what wearable projects did you work on in the past?
Our group has been working on contact lenses, neural implants, and smart bandages amongst other technologies.
2. In which areas do you see major use cases for wearable technology in the future?
Definitely in the medical domain. Also, smartphones are nowadays very powerful wearable computers.
3. Do you see wearables hitting the mainstream anytime soon apart from in the sporting goods market?
It’s already mainstream with smartphones. Closer interfaces with the body, e.g. via a bandage, will take more time to develop.
4. What wearable technology still needs to be developed in your opinion?
I’d rather not hazard a guess here 🙂
5. What is your favourite Wearable Technologies product?
At the moment, definitely smartphone for a wearable technology that has a lot of integrated electronics. For devices that interface closely with the body, I can think of contact lenses and heart implants as two very successful technologies.
Image: EETimes
