Using Wearables for Travel Assistance

In the last decade, personal mobility has become more diverse and more complex. Public transportation networks have grown bigger and new travel modes, e.g., car sharing, have emerged. Thus the required electronic travel assistance, usually provided by smartphone applications, has been well-established and is generally accepted. Unfortunately using a smartphone application to check the itinerary while travelling can be a hassle. The traveller has to pull out the device, unlock it, start the application and find the required information inside the application. In the meantime he or she is distracted which causes a loose of time and also may lead to dangerous situations, e.g., in traffic. To improve this situation we developed a smartwatch application following the Cascading Information Theory principle which assists the traveller by displaying all journey-related required information on his or her wrist and notifies him or her when necessary. The prototype of the application was evaluat ed in an initial user test (n = 5) and improvement compared to a single smartphone application was assessed. The evaluation results showed that users prefer a smartwatch/smartphone based solution over a pure smartphone application and are distracted for a shorter timespan.