ODCSSS gain

"Odysseus students should gain strength from their numbers both prior, during and after this internship program. We hope these students will form connections with their peers and mentors that will last well beyond the 12 weeks with us"

Project 2606-dcu: interfacing and applications of garments with sensing capabilities

This project is very related to the project 2506- DCU entitled "Smart Materials and Instrumentation for Sensing", under the same supervisor. Within the Adaptive Information Cluster we have been able to develop several demonstrator garments for healthcare, sports and for general use and some of these have been based upon a smart fabric that we have developed within our labs. In the related project, 2506-DCU, a student will develop further smart materials with greater breathability. In this project the student will be required to generate functional garments that include soft polymer based strain gauges such as functionalised foams (sense compression) and lycra (sense stretching) and communications capabilities via wireless motes.

Examples of the kinds of garments we envisage include gloves that can sense finger movements, knee bandages that sense leg bending, or T-shirts that sense breathing. The student will be provided with the smart materials and motes for wireless communication to a basestation and we already have some of the infrastructure for this in place. The main activity during the project will be realising user interfaces and visualisations of the movements (e.g. 3-d simulation of the glove movements in real time) and the work will be done in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher who has developed similar but much simpler functional garments . In the second half of the project, a demonstrator application will be developed e.g. specific interface for rehabilitation of people with impaired limb movement e.g. for use by a physiotherapist. Another possibility would be to use the glove as a user interface to a PC.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

The research group of Prof. Diamond has been responsible for development of chemo and bio sensing technology which has led to the development of several wearable garment interfaces for pervasive computing within the AIC. This project, and the sister project 2606, will produce demonstrator garment(s) with sensing capabilities. It will also interact extensively with the related project run by prof. Barry Smyth at UCD, project 2006.

Supervisors:

Prof. Dermot Diamond, (AIC, DCU)

 

Keywords:

Chemical sensing, wearable computing, interfaces, wireless communications.