Nearly all future mobile phones will have accelerometers built in, so why are wockets necessary?
There has been some nice research recently showing reasonably good activity recognition performance using only the sensors that are already built into the mobile phones. For those people who carry mobile phones attached to a belt or in their pockets, it will definitely be possible for the phones to detect some activities (e.g., sedentary vs. walking). However, despite some of the results that have been reported, research at MIT suggests that adding 1-2 additional wireless accelerometers may dramatically increase robustness as well as the number and variety of activities and activity intensities that might be automatically detected by the phone. Moreover, not everyone will be willing to carry a phone in an “optimal” way for activity detection. It may be more convenient to wear a specially-designed sensor underneath clothing, especially if the phone can do many interesting things for someone if they do. All that said, the wockets phone software will permit the use of wockets only, the ph
