When cyborgs meet: building communities of cooperating wearable agents

This paper introduces the notion of a Wearable Community as a group of wearable users who cooperate for their mutual benefit. In such a community, wearable computers act as personal agents on behalf of and in the interest of their 'owners'. These agents are goal-directed and will perform a broad array of tasks for the user, ranging from personal scheduling to task planning. We describe how personal wearable agents can be used to enable goal directed cooperation during physical encounters of people with selfish and conflicting goals, such that cooperation leads to mutually beneficial results. We discuss negotiation protocols, and describe the design and implementation of a wearable agent system, as well as a simulator for large-scale wearable communities.