Professor Dario Farina, Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, 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 possibility of changing people’s life with technologies that would be incorporate in daily living activities in a disruptive way.

What are you currently working on that you’d like to tell us about?

I am passionate about electrical signals we record from muscles with wearable sensors and about how these signals can be decoded to extract the neural code sent to muscle from the nervous system. We have developed a wearable system that records muscle signals and extracts from them the exact spiking activity of cells in the spinal cord that are connected to the muscles. In this way, we now have a non-invasive technology that provides an observation window into the output of the human spinal cord during natural movements. We are using it for establishing man-machine interfacing for clinical uses as well as for large consumer electronics.

What do you think the journal Wearable Technologies will bring to the field?

This is the first journal specifically dedicated to wearables and, as such, it will provide a fundamental contribution in increasing the impact of the field.

What are some of the challenges facing the field today?

Transmission bandwidth for a very large number of sensors is a challenge. We are trying to scale up our muscle recordings to thousands of electrodes distributed over the body with textile materials and this implies a very large amount of data to transmit. Online processing of the recorded signals is also a challenge, for example when the wearable sensors are used to establish man-machine interfacing that needs to work in real time.

In which areas of the wearable technologies field do you expect to see growth in the next five to ten years?

Early diagnosis may be a very fast growing area for wearable sensors. For example, Parkinson’s disease is usually diagnosed late for effective treatment while wearable technologies and AI may provide very early detection.

Why should authors publish in Wearable Technologies?

It is the only journal specifically focusing on wearables and therefore the published papers would have maximal visibility in the field. Wearable technology is a growing field and having specific visibility within it (rather than publishing as a side topic in less specialised journals) will increase the impact of the work. The journal is also making a big effort in timely review and fast publishing, which is needed in a field of fast advances.