Micraspis: A Computer-Aided Proposal Toward Programming and Architecting Smart IoT Wearables

A wearable is a lightweight body-worn device that relies on data-driven communications to keep people connected purposefully, for instance, for fire-fighting, prompting fast-food clients, and medical treatment. With rise of wearable computing in the era of IoT-driven smart applications, programmers now expect the time to market for these devices to be shortened. While support for IoT programming in general has gathered traction, tool proposals that automate the development of smart solutions based on the Internet of Wearable Things, though of paramount importance, still stay on the sidelines. We propose a code generation tool called Micraspis that allows a wearable to be described both functionally and architecturally - as if they are two sides of the same coin. The tool has an underlying model-to-code transformation mechanism to generates source code that is executable on a specific IoT programming platform such as Arduino. Our experiments demonstrate that programming code generated by Micraspis amounts to at least 60% of the source code needed to fulfill the business logic of ordinary wearable devices. We conduct an interview to meticulously collect programmers' assessment on how Micraspis assists them in programming and architecting smart IoT wearables. A total of 161 programmers responded to a Likert scale questionnaire, with which at least 65% of them either agree or strongly agree. Overall, the results show that Micraspis has promising applicability in supporting IoWT-enabled smart solutions.