Google’s Project Ara could be used for wearables as well

Project Ara is primarily focused on building a modular smartphone in the hopes of changing the industry, but is that the only type of mobile device on the drawing board? Absolutely not. An executive at Toshiba, one of Google’s partners on the project, just revealed that his company’s vision of the concept goes beyond smartphones. Shardul Kazi, Senior VP and Technology Executive at Toshiba, posited that devices like smartwatches could also take advantage of Ara’s blocky component modules.

Google’s Project Ara could be a smartphone revolution, but why stop there? Toshiba has big plans to push the modular concept beyond the phone and into wearables. As one of Google’s partners on the Ara project, Toshiba sees a lot more potential in the mix-n-match project, as it revealed at the Ara Developer Conference. Shardul Kazi, Toshiba’s senior vice president, said that smartwatches and other wearables could also use be formed of block-like modules, allowing owners to customise their own device. During the presentation, Kazi showed a concept where a module could be taken straight from the phone and placed into a wearable device. In the example given, it was an activity tracker with a nine-axis sensor.