Software and Hardware Requirements and Trade-Offs in Operating Systems for Wearables: A Tool to Improve Devices’ Performance

Wearable device requirements currently vary from soft to hard real-time constraints. Frequently, hardware improvements are a way to speed-up the global performance of a solution. However, changing some parts or the whole hardware may increase device complexity, raising the costs and leading to development delays of products or research prototypes. This paper focuses on software improvements, presenting a tool designed to create different versions of operating systems (OSs) fitting the specifications of wearable devices projects. Authors have developed a software tool allowing the end-user to craft a new OS in just a few steps. In order to validate the generated OS, an original wearable prototype for mining environments is outlined. Resulting data presented here allows for measuring the actual impact an OS has in different variables of a solution. Finally, the analysis also allows for evaluating the performance impact associated with each hardware part. Results suggest the viability of using the proposed solution when searching for performance improvements on wearables.