Background and Problem Statement

Smart watches as a form of wearable computing have been available for a number of decades, but have recently been found to be becoming more popular with the Samsung Galaxy Gear and the Pebble smart watch as some notable examples. The question has been posed as to whether these devices can be considered useful to university students, and what students would want to use a smart watch for. Smart watches which were previously available, such as IBM's Linux smart watch (Narayanaswami, Kamijoh, Raghunath, Inoue, & Cipolla, 2002), offered a limited number of applications at the discretion of manufacturers with no intention of taking advantage of any open source software solutions (Smith, 2013). With the standardization of an application programming interface (API) and the increasing availability of libraries through software development kits (SDK's) for smart watches, new applications can be created more quickly by developers in response to users' requirements (Sachse, 2010).

A number of applications are already available for smart watches, however investigations into the desire to use a smart watch for viewing information on, and the applications which are wanted by users are not commonplace. Another issue which needs to be addressed is that of using a smart watch as a feasible interface to view information on, especially in situations where mobile phones could be difficult or inconvenient to access (Chyla, 2013).