CLOSED: Special Issue on Wearable Computing

Important Dates

Submissions Due: 09 April 2026

Publication: September/October 2026

We invite researchers to contribute to our forthcoming special issue on Wearable Computing. Wearable systems are rapidly reshaping how humans sense, interact with, and interpret the world. Advances in miniaturised electronics, ultra-low-power sensing, wireless connectivity, on-device machine learning, edge and cloud hybrid architectures, and the growing integration of multimodal large language models and foundation models have enabled new generations of intelligent, body-worn devices. These systems increasingly support applications in health monitoring, augmented and mixed reality, human-machine collaboration, pervasive sensing, and next-generation Internet-of-Things ecosystems.

This special issue of IEEE Internet Computing will spotlight advances across the full stack of wearable systems. We seek submissions that examine core technologies, device and system architectures, sensing and inference pipelines, communication protocols, user interfaces, and large-scale deployments that contribute to the development of reliable, interpretable, accessible, and human-centered wearable computing infrastructures.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Wearable Hardware Platforms: Device form factors, smart textiles, flexible and stretchable electronics, and body-worn sensing systems
• Embedded Sensing and Actuation: Physiological sensing, inertial and motion tracking, multimodal fusion, and context-aware environments
• On-Device Intelligence: Ultra-low-power machine learning, TinyML, distributed learning, and federated learning for wearables
• LLMs, MLLMs, and Foundation Models: On-device adaptation, edge-assisted inference, privacy-preserving training, and wearable-centric agentic applications
• Wearable Communications: Body area networks, device-to-device links, and wearable-to-edge/cloud communication protocols
• Middleware and System Software: Operating systems, resource management, data pipelines, and software frameworks for wearable ecosystems
• Privacy, Security, and Ethics: Continuous monitoring, data leakage risks, access control, trust management, and responsible data practices
• Human–Computer Interaction: User experience, ergonomics, accessibility, and interaction techniques tailored for wearable devices
• Applications: Health and wellness, elder care, sports and fitness, workplace safety, AR/VR/MR interfaces, smart garments, and broader IoT integration
• Edge/Cloud Architectures: Offloading strategies, latency–energy tradeoffs, and hybrid computation models
• Interoperability and Deployment: Standardisation, integration with IoT infrastructures, and scalable field deployments
• User Studies and Societal Impact: Longitudinal deployments, behaviour change, engagement, and ethical considerations
• Evaluation and Testbeds: Benchmarking methods, experimental deployments, testbeds, and reproducibility frameworks

Submission Guidelines

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the Author’s Information Page. Please submit papers through the IEEE Author Portal and be sure to select “Special Issue: Wearable Computing” when submitting your article. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts. If requested, abstracts should be sent by email to the guest editors directly.

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Internet Computing, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE’s data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!

Questions?

Please contact the lead guest editors at jiang@ee.columbia.edu:

• Xiaofan (Fred) Jiang, Lead Guest Editor, Columbia University
• Bashima Islam, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
• Stephen Xia, Northwestern University