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Nov. 1--The autistic teen hiker from West Virginia who was found after getting lost in the wilderness will get a Project Lifesaver International locator bracelet today.

The mother of Jacob Allen, 18, of Morgantown, W.Va., said Tuesday she is thrilled to be getting one of the wristwatch-size radio beacons. The device helps emergency agencies trained by the Chesapeake-based search-and-rescue group find a missing person Link necklace.

"We have been looking for something for a long time," Karen Allen said from

her home. "I figured the technology was out there somewhere but we couldn't find it."

A West Virginia law enforcement agency that recently joined Project Lifesaver and a Pittsburgh-based autism group donated the device and waived the monthly fee for the service.

Jacob Allen got lost two weeks ago while he was on a hiking trail with his family in West Virginia's Dolly Sods Wilderness Area.

Hundreds of volunteers and trained professionals looked for him for days. The search was complicated by the fact that he does not speak.

He was found four days later, less than one mile from where he walked off the valentines jewelry.

During that time, deputies from the Monongalia County Sheriff's Department were being trained in how to use the radio signal tracking device. Around the same period, a searcher from Pittsburgh told Karen Allen about Project Lifesaver.

"It's just another miracle," she said about finding her son alive and learning about the tracking device.

Project Lifesaver has 600 member agencies across North America.

Since 1999, the non profit

has rescued more than 1,400 adults with medical conditions such as Alzheimer's and dementia, and children with special needs.

According to the group, it takes an average of 30 minutes to find a missing

person wearing a locator Heart Link lariat.

The searches are done on foot and from the air.

Thad Starner first started wearing his computer in 1993. He would strap a shoe box of electronics to his waist and a small keyboard to his wrist and don a bulky headset with a small display monitor suspended in front of his left eye. After a while the other students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stopped gawking and accepted him as just another Elsa Peretti Carved Heart bracelet. Nowadays, however, Starner is looking much more fashionable. He's a professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, for one thing, and his wearable computer looks just like a pair of ordinary black-rimmed glasses--except for the thumb-size gadget on the frame that beams a tiny, bright image onto the lens. "The goal," says Starner, "is to have the computer disappear into your clothes so that no one knows you have it."

Starner is a living history of wearable computers. What used to be clunky contraptions only a nerd could love have now gotten closer than they've ever been to disappearing into your clothes. High-tech companies such as IBM and Philips, and also clothing firms such as Levi Strauss and Nike, are putting miniature computers into everything from wristwatches to running shoes. These are not stand- alone devices: they're linked to each other and wirelessly to the Internet.

Many high-tech firms were testing the waters at last week's CeBIT, the giant technology trade fair in Hanover, Germany. IBM showed wearable computer peripherals such as a silver necklace with a hidden microphone, a woman's display watch, earrings with speakers, and a ring whose elegant turquoise stone doubles as a nifty scroll-point mouse. Equipped with tiny, wireless Bluetooth transmitters, these are unobtrusive interfaces for a computer or a phone. "If you have something with you all the time, you might as well be able to wear it," says Cameron Miner, lead scientist at IBM's design lab in San Jose, California.

IBM isn't saying when products will come out. But Philips and partner Levi Strauss, the bluejeans maker, are bringing out a summer collection of "wearable electronic garments"--jackets with a GSM mobile and an MP3 player in special pockets, with a remote control on the front flap of the jacket and a microphone in the collar. The wires are sewn in. The two devices work together, with the music turning off when you talk on the phone. (The winter collection, available only in Europe, has already sold out.) Hitachi confirmed it was bringing out a wearable, wireless Internet device in Japan this summer with a lightweight Shimadzu headset to let you walk, talk and surf the Web at the same time.

What exactly are we supposed to do with all this technology? "The introduction of Elsa Peretti-on, next-generation wireless devices will let us communicate, interact, get information and entertainment wherever we go, all the time," says analyst Jackie Fenn of Gartner Group in Lowell, Massachusetts. She envisions always-on e-mail, "buddy alerts" that sense if your friends are nearby, plus downloadable music and video wherever you go. "Proactive" computers will remind you to do things, tell you if you're about to forget your keys at home and guide you through a world in which everything is "smart" and gives out information. Staying in tune with all that requires more than a handheld in your briefcase. That's why Gartner estimates that by 2010, 40 percent of adults and 75 percent of teenagers will wear always-on gadgets. For every hour they spend in the real world, they'll spend 10 in the "e-world."

Nike is targeting today's kids as early adopters of wearable technology. Last year the firm set up a new Techlab division to develop such products as a running shoe with a built-in wireless pedometer that tracks speed and distance. Rival Adidas has joined a consortium that's developing high-tech fabrics that turn clothes into sensors, data networks and walking antennas. Medicine is also conducive to wearables. One firm is developing a wristwatch that beams data to your doctor. Another is working on sensors with wireless transmitters for diabetics.

Before wearables become commonplace, engineers will have to resolve a few technical issues. First, third-generation wireless technology will have to be made reliable enough to support always-on gadgets. Bluetooth--a wireless technology made for small, personal area networks that link wearable devices to each other--is only starting to come out after big development delays. The wearable devices themselves are also costly: Hitachi's new wearables will cost $1,700, and others can run to $7,000. And making our environment "smart" so that every shop or product can send out information will take a new kind of infrastructure--big servers that direct the flow of information behind the scenes. That's not likely to be up and running any time Tiffany 1837 Charm bracelet.

And besides, do we really want to be always connected everywhere we go? "The only alternative I see is that we're not the information and communications junkies that I think we are," says Gartner's Fenn. And that's not likely.

You would never mistake Ball for Tiffany, even if it were on Fifth Avenue instead of Elsa Peretti Butterfly Earrings.

The shop, which opened in October at 500 Greenwich Street, features the works of its namesake artist and jewelry maker, Lillian Ball, who finds inspiration in unlikely everyday objects. The most striking example is her drug collection. Ms. Ball makes necklaces, rings, pendants and earrings in the shape of pharmaceuticals whose shapes catch her fancy. She does not lack inspiration.

Her epiphany came several years ago aboard a plane as she was about to swallow a vitamin E pill. As the sunlight hit the translucent capsule, she thought, ''Wow, this would look great cast in gold.'' At that moment, a jewelry line was born.

Ms. Ball, who is especially attracted by the geometry of medications, began using white, yellow and rose gold, along with sterling silver, to cast replicas of Advil, the oblong headache remedy; Viagra, the blue, diamond-shaped potency restorer; triangular sleeping pills with rounded corners; and the inspirational vitamin E Somerset basic hoop earrings. Some drugs, like Prozac, were rejected; Ms. Ball says she found its ordinary capsule shape too boring.

At the shop, individual items of jewelry are displayed next to the pharmaceuticals that inspired them; there are pills in glass containers, including Minizide, which Ms. Ball takes for tendinitis, and chemical beakers hang in the windows.

One customer bought a set of earrings inspired by headache medicine for her daughter as a wedding Heart Clover Earrings. Her explanation, she told Ms. Ball, was that she thought the groom would be ''a real headache.'' WICKHAM BOYLE