Also known as: Wearable
A wearable computer is a small computing device worn on the body — on the wrist, head, ear, or clothing — built to provide hands-free, always-available computing.1
Overview
Wearables span smartwatches and fitness bands, smart glasses and AR headsets, and “hearables” such as smart earbuds. All share the same constraints: a tiny SoC, a small or absent display, low-power radios like Bluetooth and NFC, and a battery measured in fractions of a phone’s. Many lean on a paired smartphone for heavy lifting and connectivity, acting as a sensor-rich satellite rather than a standalone computer.
Where it fits
The category is defined by being on the body rather than in a pocket, which favors continuous sensing — motion, heart rate, location via GPS — over raw performance. The extreme size and power limits make wearables the most constrained tier of personal computing, suited to capturing and relaying data, not to running compute-heavy workloads on their own.
Sources
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Wearable computer — Wikipedia, on body-worn computing devices and their forms. ↩