Wearable pressure ulcer prevention sensor patches

This project designed and developed a wearable fabric sensor patch and an according front-end monitoring system. The fabric sensor is capable of monitoring pressure, humidity, and temperature of pressure ulcer-prone areas of the body. When high PU risk is detected, the caregiver will receive a warning message and corresponding recommendations for care operations.

Glove input for gamified wrist rehablitation

Everyday textile accessories can easily be endowed with input functionalities using brush-coating. We brush-coated a glove to augment it into a wearable bend input for gamified rehabilitation training. It can capture exercise motions and thus control game objects, such as moving a rabbit to eat carrots. When wrong motions are detected, the glove will vibrate to alert the user. Personalized exercise sequence can be tailored by customizing game maps, making dull rehabilitation training more engaging.

Firefighter neck-wear with heat warning

We designed a smart neck-wear worn inside the heat-insulating jacket that can alert firefighters to dangerous temperatures next to skins: when temperatures hit 60°C, the neck-wear will start beeping and vibrating. The fabric base is water-proof to avoid the humidity influence from sweat on the fabric temperature sensor.

Interactive fluffy piano pillow

Utilizing textile's special and pleasant hand-feel, we created an interactive fluffy piano pillow. Capacitive sensing is utilized to capture touching and approaching events. By doing this, we demonstrated that arbitrary textiles can be turned into touch-sensing interfaces using the double-coating process and thus provide engaging tactile feedback and special emotional connection.

In this project, we also provide tech details in terms of how capacitive sensing works with out double-coated fabric.

Pinball game input

Taking advantage of the flexibility and elasticity of textiles, we combined our approach with concepts of textile sculpture and fabricated an interface using highly elastic fabrics. Four layers elastic fabric are combined to sense a wider range of push inputs. We further demonstrated its interaction potentials by using it as a game input for a pinball game, serving as a realistic force simulator for pressing the spring in the virtual game.