I/O innovation is just the tonic the wrist-worn category has been desperately seeking.

The Apple Watch's Digital Crown was not it, but Carnegie Mellon researchers may be onto something with SkinTrack if both the physical footprint and BOM can be made small enough.

VIDEO 

photo1 - Place Calls



photo2 - Triangulating Cursor Position




The lack of a true advance in UI innovation is holding back the wrist-worn category. This is as fundamental to smartwatches as pinch 'n zoom was for smartphones.

Together with autonomous cellular connectivity, new input paradigms like SkinTrack can open up a wealth of use cases that we believe will serve to liberate smartwatches from their smartphone masters.




For more on wearable device user interfaces, refer to our Mobile Device UX service. 

For more on scaling the size of the wearable device market and its ecosystem, refer to our Wearable Device Ecosystem service.