The head of a promising U.S. wearable device start-up said the most important factor in the era of wearable smart gadgets is user experience, not the integration of all the functions available on a smartphone.

“It has to not only do what it’s designed to do really well, but it can’t make your life harder in any other way,” Aaron Grant, cofounder of Waterloo, Canada-based Thalmic Labs, a developer of motion control armband Myo, told The Korea Herald.

“With some home automation smartphone apps, for instance, instead of just walking up to a light switch on the wall and flicking it, you have to pull out your phone, unlock it, open the app, find the specific thing and then turn the light on.”

He said trying to incorporate every single feature of a smartphone in a wearable device was not the best approach.

“Some products like the Galaxy Gear, they just essentially packed everything they could think of into it. I think that’s actually not the best approach.”

Aaron Grant participated in the fifth Tech Plus Forum 2013, an annual tech conference, held at Sejong University in Seoul.

He established the firm with two fellow alumni of the University of Waterloo in Canada, Stephen Lake and Matthew Bailey. The three have spent years together working on wearable technology.

Myo has a vibration motor which is built into the band, and gives some kind of feedback as to whether the user’s motion was recognized.

Algorithms of the armband detect these gestures and interpret what users want to accomplish.

He said his firm was pushing to partner up with more Korean firms, especially those in the game industry.

“The Myo is so broad that we can partner with companies in many different areas,” he added.

Other speakers at the conference include Sridhar Iyengar, cofounder and chief technology officer of Misfit, a developer of activity tracker Shine; Eric Drexler, an American nanotechnology researcher and writer of “Engines of Creation”; and Maxwell Bogue, a software engineer at robot developing company WowWee.

The conference was organized by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology, a government institute that promotes technological policy and establishes industrial technology infrastructure. 

By Kim Young-won, Kim Joo-hyun

(wone0102@heraldcorp.com)

(jhk@heraldcorp.com)