Making Sensors, Making Sense, Making Stimuli: The State of the Art in Wearables Research from ISWC 2019

The International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) has been the leading research venue for wearable technology research since 1997. This year, the 23rd ISWC was held in London, UK from Sept 9-13th. Following on the last 8 years of successful collaboration, ISWC was co-located with the 2019 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)

Thermal protection properties of aerogel-coated Kevlar woven fabrics

This paper investigated the thermal properties of aerogel-coated Kevlar fabrics under both the ambient temperature and high temperature with laser radiation. It is found that the aerogels combined with a Kevlar fabric contribute to a higher thermal insulation value. Under laser radiation with high temperature, the aerogel content plays a vital role on the surface temperature of the fabrics. At laser radiations with pixel time 330 μs, the surface temperatures of the aerogel coated Kevlar fabrics are 400-440°C lower than that of the uncoated fabric. Results also show that the fabric temperature is directly proportional to pixel time. It can be concluded that the Kevlar fabrics coated with silica aerogel provides better thermal protection under high temperature

'The emotional wardrobe': a fashion perspective on the integration of technology and clothing

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology

Weavesound: interactive woven textiles that emit the sounds of being touched

This research employs a practice-based approach to examining the multi-sensory relationship between textiles and the body. Eczema, the highly sensitive skin condition, is used as a conceptual prism to scrutinise this relationship. Its rough three-dimensional surface is the basis for a range of electronic woven textiles that have been made into garments. The textiles are constructed from materials also used in the treatment of eczema, although the fabrics are not intended to be therapeutic. When the textiles are touched, their amplified sounds of being touched in real time is emitted through speakers. The sounds evidence the materiality of cloth and refer to the materiality of the body, whilst also highlighting the sounds of textiles themselves. The project also highlights the importance of touch in relation to textiles and the embodied nature of clothing. The research contests the historical western hierarchy of the senses, in which sight is privileged above all others, and challenges the dominance of sight in the appreciation of artworks. It is informed by recent developments in neuroscience, experimental psychology and sensory anthropology, as well as the sensory and material turns in the arts and humanities. The approach to the research has been cross-disciplinary and straddles craft, textile technology, electronics and computing, sound recording, and medical science. The enquiry has employed a process-led methodology of learning through making, combining traditional hand craft skills with digital technology. The research uncovered findings in three areas. The first concerns the delicate reciprocal relationship between textiles and eczematous skin, the second concerns the sounds of textiles being touched, and the third concerns public engagement with eczema research. These areas are generally investigated through scientific outputs, but in this research they are scrutinised through an interactive artistic output that reveals the multi-sensory experience of wearing textiles and the materiality of the body and cloth

Smart Fabric sensors for foot motion monitoring

Smart Fabrics or fabrics that have the characteristics of sensors are a wide and emerging field of study. This thesis summarizes an investigation into the development of fabric sensors for use in sensorized socks that can be used to gather real time information about the foot such as gait features. Conventional technologies usually provide 2D information about the foot. Sensorized socks are able to provide angular data in which foot angles are correlated to the output from the sensor enabling 3D monitoring of foot position. Current angle detection mechanisms are mainly heavy and cumbersome; the sensorized socks are not only portable but also non-invasive to the subject who wears them. The incorporation of wireless features into the sensorized socks enabled a remote monitoring of the foot

Organic User Interfaces for InteractiveInterior Design

PhD ThesisOrganic User Interfaces (OUIs) are flexible, actuated, digital interfaces characterized by being aesthetically pleasing, physically manipulated and ubiquitously embedded within real-world environments. I postulate that OUIs have specific qualities that offer great potential to realize the vision of smart spaces and ubiquitous computing environments. This thesis makes the case for embedding OUI interaction into architectural spaces, interior elements and decorative artefacts using smart materials – a concept I term ‘OUI Interiors’. Through this thesis, I investigate: 1) What interactive materials and making techniques can be used to design and build OUIs? 2) What OUI decorative artefacts and interior elements can we create? and 3) What can we learn for design by situating OUI interiors? These key research questions form the basis of this PhD and guide all stages of inquiry, analysis, and reporting. Grounded by the state-of-the-art of Interactive Interiors in both research and practice, I developed new techniques of seamlessly embedding smart materials into interior finishing materials via research through design exploration (in the form of a Swatchbook). I also prototyped a number of interactive decorative objects that change shape and colour as a form of organicactuation, in response to seamless soft-sensing (presented in a Product Catalogue). These inspirational artefacts include table-runners, wall-art, pattern-changing wall-tiles, furry-throw, vase, cushion and matching painting, rug, objets d’art and tasselled curtain. Moreover, my situated studies of how people interact idiosyncratically with interactive decorative objects provide insights and reflections on the overall material experience. Through multi-disciplinary collaboration, I have also put these materials in the hands of designers to realize the potentials and limitations of such a paradigm and design three interactive spaces. The results of my research are materialized in a tangible outcome (a Manifesto) exploring design opportunities of OUI Interior Design, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities

Computation and technology as expressive elements of fashion

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (91-92).This thesis explores technology and computation as elements of fashion. Far beyond the definition of clothing as a necessary protective covering, fashion exists as a way for people to express themselves to others, to reflect portions of their personality in their outward appearance, and to distinguish themselves as individuals. How can technology enhance these expressive aspects of what we wear? The goal of my research is to create examples of new types of clothing based on computation, which provide modes of expression unachievable with traditional garment techniques. In this thesis, I define an area of design and research which is a synthesis of technology, computation, and fashion. I explore the constituent properties (axes) of the design space through research experiments, and present basic software and hardware architectures on which to build relevant examples of computational fashion.by Elise Dee Co.S.M