Associate Professor Peter B. Shull of Shanghai Jiao Tong University,answers our questions about his work and Cambridge University Press’s new journal Wearable Technologies.

What first attracted you to the field of wearable technologies?
The potential ability of wearable technologies to bring science, medical treatments, and sports enhancing modalities outside of traditional laboratories, hospitals, and specialized training facilities to significantly impact society.

What are you currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?
Many new wrist- and hand-worn sensing technologies and algorithms could significantly improve hand gesture recognition for rehabilitation, automated sign language recognition, and virtual reality. Also, new wearable biofeedback systems can now enable real-time movement training outside of traditional laboratories and hospitals.

What do you think the journal Wearable Technologies will bring to the field?
Wearable Technologies is the first journal dedicated specifically to the rapidly emerging field of wearables for a variety of fundamental and applied applications.

What are some of the challenges facing the field today?
Algorithms are needed that are accurate and robust enough to be used long-term in real-life settings and that require no or minimal training data. Wearable designs need to be both light enough to be unintrusive and powerful enough to provide meaningful active support.

In which areas of the wearable technologies field do you expect to see growth in the next five to ten years?
Wearables for home-based rehabilitation. Clothing-embedded wearables for health and sports. Powered soft wearables for human augmentation.

Why should authors publish in Wearable Technologies?
Wearable Technologies is the first journal dedicated specifically to wearables research, with potential for rapid growth and widespread impact.