ITR: Tailor-Made: Design of e-Textile Architectures for Wearable Computing

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ABSTRACT 0219809Thomas L. MartinVa Poly Inst. Wearable computing has the potential to allow access to information anytime and anyplace. Three of the major goals of wearable computing are to allow the user to go about a normal daily routine while constantly wearing a device, to be invisible to those around the user, and to be aware of the user.s actions and location. The purpose of this research is to investigate the wearable computing uses of electronic textiles (e-textiles), a novel hardware/software platform that has the potential to solve many of the problems in achieving these goals, and to create a design environment for e-textile-based wearable computing. E-textiles are fabrics that have electronics and interconnections woven into them. The electronics consist of general-purpose microprocessors, digital signal processors, sensors, and actuators at regular intervals throughout the fabric. E-textiles allow the creation of systems with a physical flexibility and size that cannot be achieved with currently available electronic manufacturing techniques. Components and interconnections are a part of the fabric and thus are much less visible and, more importantly, not susceptible to becoming tangled together or snagged by the surroundings. Consequently, e-textiles can be worn in everyday situations where currently available wearable computers would hinder the user. E-textiles also have greater flexibility in adapting to changes in the computational and sensing requirements of an application for the purpose of managing power consumption and context awareness. The number and location of sensor and processing elements can be dynamically tailored to the current needs of the user and application, rather than being fixed at design time.