Software organization for dynamic and adaptable wearable systems

There is a growing interest in a class of systems having dynamic and adaptable properties. In this paper we discuss our work on one subclass of such systems, that of wearable computers. In particular, our interest is in the software organization necessary to build wearable computing systems. We will examine some of the key properties of such a software organization such as the ability to rapidly and dynamically reconfigure software to meet both physical changes and information changes of the wearable system. This has lead us to study a middleware layer for a wearable system that supports dynamic reconfiguration. The middleware approach is studied in the context of the NETMAN - a network maintenance assistant. Current results from the system evaluations and the final system requirements and open issues are presented.