2015 will probably be the year of wearables. As part of an innovation project at BTEXX we tried to unmistify the magic behind it and implemented a couple of Smart Watch prototypes based on SAP Portal backend data, because you do not need to wait for S/4HANA to build a fancy SAP Smart Watch App … 
We are happy to share our experience in a “Portal on Smart Watch” blog series. Which we would like to divide in 3 parts:
- Part 1: Introduction and Portal Scenarios on Pebble Smart Watch
- Part 2: Portal Scenarios on Android Wear
- Part 3: One more thing: Portal Scenarios on the Apple Watch
Introduction to Wearables
Current research studies, e.g. from Forrester, have shown that end users and enterprises are interested in wearables and are planning to use them or are willing to invest in business cases based on them. Forrester has published the following 5 predictions of wearables:
- The people want it
- The business wants it even more
- Companies are inventing new business and service models around wearables
- Wearables involve surprises
- The target can be an all-body network
Source: CIO/Forrester (German Site) or an alternative English blog about the topic
Pebble Smart Watch
If you are following the smart watch market, you have probably heard of Pebble. Pebble was successfully funded via the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter in 2012 and till now they have sold over 1 Mio. Smart Watches. Currently they are funding their new edition “Pebble Time”, which will be again the biggest campaign on Kickstarter. On the first day of the campaign they have raised over 5 Mio. dollar alone…
For our development we used the “Pebble Steel” which works as companion watch for Apple iPhones or Android Phones. The watch has a 144 x 168 pixel black and white e-ink display and you can implement the following kind of watch apps:
- Watchfaces: Modern or classic watchface enriched via smart information, e.g. from an SAP System
- Notifications: Push notifications, primarily the Pebble is displaying notifications from the connected smartphone
- Watch Apps: Custom smart watch app implementations based on the Pebble SDK
What I loved during the development/prototyping was the cloud based development environment, without a local setup I was able to develop my first watchface in a couple of minutes and was able to deploy and test the development on the watch. A good start for Pebble developers is the Pebble Developer Site, which offers good tutorials and API documentation.
But now let’s have a look what scenarios/prototypes we have implemented for the Pebble.
Portal Scenario 1: UWL Watchface
Simple UWL watchface implementation, which shows next to the time (it’s still a watch) the total number of open tasks (e.g. 8 tasks) and details of the latest task, in this case a HR time correction request (Clock-in) of Dieter Martens…
Portal Scenario 2: BTEXX mobilePortal on Pebble
This menu based smart watch application displays the latest news, tasks and services…
The UWL tasks can even be approved/rejected via the watch…
Architecture
The native watch apps are implemented in C (Layout and Business Logic) and Javascript (Connectivity to the Internet/REST Services) and are running directly on the watch on top of the Pebble SDK.
Via bluetooth coupling between the watch and the smartphone the Pebble SDK on the watch can connect via the Pebble Companion App on the smartphone to our REST API of the BTEXX mobilePortal to access e.g. Universal Worklist entries, etc…
I hope you found the provided information valuable! I am looking forward to your feedback or questions!
Stay tuned for the Portal Scenarios on Android Wear and on the Apple Watch… hopefully we will find time to write the blogs in the next weeks...
Best regards,
Michael
About BTEXX
Based on the connection between user perspective, SAP technology and process know-how, BTEXX implements user-friendly solutions that make companies more efficient and users happy.