QBIC: Wearable belt-integrated Computer

The Q-Belt-Integrated-Computer (QBIC) has been designed at the Wearable Computing Lab., ETH Zurich with an emphasis on ergonomics and wearability while at the same time providing most possible functionality and flexibility. To this end the design process has been oriented around human design issues, which have provided the boundary conditions for the system architecture and electronic implementation choices.

The core part of the system is integrated in a belt buckle. In addition to housing the computer the buckle is also fully functional in terms of closing and holding a belt. Batteries and connectors are integrated in the belt, which can also be used to attach additional peripherals. The system emphasises wireless interfaces, e.g. Bluetooth, directly integrated in the buckle. The main mode for connecting non-wireless peripherals is USB which provides access to a wide range of devices with compact connectors.

Several precautions have been made to selectively switch off interfaces and scale computational performance and hence power consumption, in order to allow permanent operation on small batteries. The computer has enough capacity in both, performance and memory, to run a standard operating system, e.g. GNU/Linux. The following table provides a summary of the QBIC features:

• Processing unit Intel XScale PXA263, 400MHz, scaleable
• System memory 256MByte, SDRAM
• Power supply Two redundant batteries:
• integrated in the belt
• external attachable to the belt (hot-pluggable)
• Operating Temperature (0-40 C)
• QBIC device: 100g, Belt: 280g, external Battery: 100g

Use in WearIT@Work Project

Car Production (Skoda)

Hospital (Gespag)

References 

Design of the QBIC wearable computing platform, O. Amft, M. Lauffer, S. Ossevoort, F. Macaluso, P. Lukowicz and G. Tröster, Wearable Computing Lab, Fed. Inst. of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland, Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors, 2004

http://www.wearable-computing.ch/qbic.0.html

Actual Version

• QBIC 2.0

QBIC version comparison chart

Status

The QBIC has been developed at an academic institute, the Wearable Lab at ETH Zurich. A small batch of QBICs has been produced and parts of it has been provided to partners within the WearIT@Work project.

The development of software on the QBIC based on a Debian linux distribution is still in progress and besides ETH Zurich it is also driven by partners in the project. 

Maturity Level (?)