The NFC Forum has created an NFC device class for wireless wearable devices covering contactless payments in retail settings.

The Card Emulation (CE) Device class is the first of its kind answering a need for wearable devices that provide basic functionality and longer battery life in a tiny footprint while maintaining interoperability with the NFC ecosystem.

Wearables are electronic devices that are physically worn by individuals or embedded into clothing and can provide various services such as health monitoring and retail payments.

“The wearables industry has gone from strength to strength in recent years with the installed base now topping 400 million people worldwide,” said Kane McKenna, wearables analyst at CCS Insight. “Users expect a powerful and diverse feature set combined with sleek design and long battery life, meaning improvements to NFC efficiency will be popular. Furthermore, our research has found that the ability to make wrist-based payments is a key consideration for over a quarter of smartwatch buyers, showing how important digital wallet capabilities are.”

The CE Device works by emulating a contactless card and providing connectivity into an existing framework such as a payment or access application. Typical use cases along with the emulation of contactless banking cards for payment include fitness trackers and sports watches, smart glasses and smart clothing, public transport contactless tickets, smart rings, key fobs, gate access or anywhere card emulation functionality is required.

The Car Connectivity Consortium released an NFC CE compliant specification in version 2.0 of its Digital Key Specification.

“The CE Device creates a new category for wearables offering miniature housings and extended battery life in a more cost-effective form factor,” said Mike McCamon, executive director at the NFC Forum. “The increase in the use of wearables is being driven by the adoption of new use cases for NFC-enabled wearable devices beyond today’s payment applications.”

The CE Device class is one of seven NFC device classes. Products created in this device class can be certified by the NFC Forum to ensure interoperability with other NFC-enabled products within the NFC ecosystem.

The CE Device is a subset of the NFC mobile device class, optimised for the most common wearable use cases. For example, the CE Device does not need to offer NFC reader-writer mode, since this feature is not used in most wearables. The advantage here is that a CE device enables manufacturers to reduce the footprint and extend the battery life by excluding such unused or rarely used features.

The NFC Forum’s certification programme aims to improve the user experience and ensure seamless interoperability among NFC products, such as wearable devices. NFC Forum certification is open to NFC Forum members and non-members. It is designed for consumer products with digital and analogue testing performed by an authorised test lab. The certification fee is waived with a signed test report from a third-party lab.

The NFC Forum was launched as a non-profit industry association in 2004 by mobile communications, semiconductor and consumer electronics companies. The forum’s mission is to advance the use of near-field communication technology by developing specifications, ensuring interoperability among devices and services, and educating the market about NFC technology.

The forum’s global member companies are developing specifications for a modular NFC device architecture and protocols for interoperable data exchange and device-independent service delivery, device discovery and device capability.