Wearable health-tracking consumer products are gaining popularity, including smartwatches, fitness trackers, smart clothing, and head-mounted devices. These wearable devices promise new opportunities for the study of health-related behavior, for tracking of chronic conditions, and for innovative interventions in support of health and wellness. Next-generation wearable technologies have the potential to transform today’s hospital- centered healthcare practices into proactive, individualized care. Although it seems new technologies enter the marketplace every week, there is still a great need for research on the development of sensors, sensor-data analytics, wearable interaction modalities, and more.

In this special issue, we sought to assemble a set of articles addressing novel computational research related to any aspect of the design or use of wearables in medicine and health, including wearable hardware design, AI and data analytics algorithms, human-device interaction, security/privacy, and novel applications. Here, in Part 1 of a two-part collection of articles on this topic, we are pleased to share seven articles about the use of wearables for emotion sensing, physiotherapy, virtual reality, automated meal detection, a human data model, and a survey of physical-activity tracking.