Expanding Garment Functionality Through Embedded Electronic Technology
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Volume 4, Issue 3, Spring2005 Expanding Garment Functionality through Embedded Electronic Technology Lucy E. Dunne1, Susan P. Ashdown2, Barry Smyth1 1{lucy.dunne, barry.smyth}@ucd.ie Department of Computer Science University College Dublin [email protected] Department of Textiles and Apparel Cornell University ABSTRACT Electronic technology offers exciting new possibilities for functional clothing design. Technology allows a garment’s functionality to become dynamically adaptable, changing in response to environmental or situational changes. However, there are many challenges to integrating electronic technology into a textile-based garment structure. This paper outlines some of the possibilities and challenges to apparel designers in this new field, and highlights the importance of the apparel design perspective in the successful design of wearable technology. Keywords: Wearable technology, smart clothing, wearable computing, functional clothing, apparel design 1 Introduction influencing variables that lie outside their scope of experience. Electronically augmented clothing has the potential to meet the user’s functional This overview seeks to introduce to needs in a dynamic, efficient manner. apparel designers some of the important and However, the use of electronic and challenging new issues that arise in wearable computing technologies is a relatively new technology design. tool for apparel designers. While electronic components create new design variables for 2 Textile Foundations apparel designers, at the same time the integration of electronics into the body space Historically, functional clothing has creates new variables for technology utilized mechanical means or passive designers. Many current prototypes suffer textiles to achieve its functional goals. from the divide between these two (Watkins, 1995) For instance, cold-weather perspectives. An iterative, aware design clothing has relied on the textile’s and process can in theory help to form a garment’s ability to retain the heat produced complete design perspective, but in practice by the wearer’s body by reducing it is often difficult for designers to imagine conductive, convective, or radiant heat Article Designation: Refereed 1 JTATM Volume 4, Issue 3,Spring 2005 transfer. Such textile or mechanical on a dark busy street, suppression if the solutions are effective in static or wearer is in a darkened movie theatre). homogenous environments, where the user’s needs and environmental conditions remain 3 Background: Wearable Technology consistent over time. In variable environments or when presented with a As seen in Figure 1, the scope of diverse set of user needs, passive solutions wearable technology overlaps with that of are not always optimal. For instance, should functional clothing. Wearable technology the user of a cold-weather suit find itself contains two sub-groups of interest him/herself in a warmer environment, the here. The first is wearable computing, body- ability of the garment system to retain body mounted devices traditionally more focused heat would quickly become a negative on assuming the kind of information- feature. processing tasks performed by desktop or portable computers. The second is smart New technologies have introduced clothing, garment-integrated devices which ways to create dynamic functionality in augment the functionality of clothing, or clothing and textiles. One such method is the which impart information-processing engineering of adaptive textile structures functionality to a garment. which react to environmental changes by altering their physical properties. Examples of this include phase-change materials, UV- Wearable Technology reactive dyes, and shear-thickening fluid coatings (for more examples see Braddock Wearable and O’Mahony, 1999). Such textile Computers advances can provide garment systems which are engineered to respond to specific changes. Smart Clothing While adaptive textiles are elegant solutions to the problems they address, this tactic requires custom engineering of a Functional specific textile for every situational or environmental change. The alternative is to Clothing make use of textile and non-textile technologies whose properties change when exposed to an electric current. Electrically Figure 1: Relationships amo ng clothing active materials, when combined with sensor technologies networks, can be used to create many types The field of wearable technology of garment systems that can respond to input from multiple environmental or situational itself is a sub-set of the larger field of changes. For instance, an adaptive textile ubiquitous or pervasive computing. with a phosphorescent surface treatment Ubiquitous computing refers to computing responds to a single environmental change: devices that are embedded in everyday presence or absence of ambient light. An objects, environments, and individuals. electronically active garment system with (Weiser, 1991) They can be anything from the ability to generate a light source (Dunne, simple sensors to high-powered computer Ashdown, and McDonald, 2002) can be systems. These devices can be designed to designed to respond to any number of monitor their environment or selectively contextual changes, providing the system activate their host device based on sensor with enough information to moderate the input, and are incorporated into objects as appropriate activation or suppression of the basic as a thermostat or as advanced as garment response (activation if the wearer is smart appliances. Distributed and ubiquitous computing devices result in a flow of Article Designation: Refereed 2 JTATM Volume 4, Issue 3,Spring 2005 information that pervades our living spaces. products that are inefficient or unattractive This may seem like a ‘futuristic’ concept, to users. In wearable technology but in fact most of us interact with specifically, this is often seen in the ubiquitous technologies every day: from integration of existing portable or mobile automatic door openers to self-flushing technologies into a garment. While the toilets. We also interact with personal body- hands-free approach can be effective, worn computing devices on a daily basis: garment-integration is often not the best cell phones, PDAs and portable music solution. players are all often mounted on the body; in pockets, bags, or carried by hand. The reason for this springs from the disparity in product cost, expected lifespan, Mobile body-mounted devices take and situational appropriateness between a variety of forms: garments and complex electronic · Carried devices, which are placed in technologies. A garment is developed in a pockets or bags, and are not designed to few months, produced in a season, and be worn continuously. expected to be worn anywhere from a few · Body-mounted devices, which are months to a few years. Portable technologies designed for constant wear but do not like cell phones, mp3 players, PDAs, or necessarily take the form of a traditional laptop computers are developed in a year or garment, and are instead strapped on or more, produced in a similar time frame, and otherwise affixed to the body (see expected to last 3 years or more. Therefore, Bodine and Gemperle, 2003 for two when the two are integrated, their cost and example s) life cycle must be reconciled. Consumers are · Garment-integrated devices, which not willing to pay for an expensive are designed for constant wear and are technology (such as a personal computer) embedded into a garment; these often every time they purchase a jacket, and the function only when the user is wearing producer of the jacket will have difficulty the garment, but may also be removable shifting a product line from producing new (Barfield et al., 2001) models every 3-6 months to producing new · Implanted devices, which are models every 1-2 years. implanted directly into the user’s body; these are usually not intended to be More significantly, the device and the removable (Holland, Roberson, and garment are expected to function in a Barfield, 2001). different set of environments. Most garments are situationally specific in some This review will focus primarily on way: they are designed for specific garment-integrated devices, as these are the environmental conditions and social most relevant to apparel-based research. environments. Portable devices, on the other hand, are generally required in a broader set 4 Wearable Technology: A New Design of situations. If an mp3 player is Challenge permanently integrated into a garment, then that specific garment must be worn any time As with any attractive new technology the user wishes to make use of the device. or concept, one major design problem is Either the garment must become as versatile over-application. There is a tendency on the as the device, or the device must become part of designers and developers to create inexpensive enough that the user may own wearable technology for the sake of as many devices as situational garments. wearable technology. This results in the “because we can” application, or In the design of wearable technology, applications in which a problem is sought the designer must continually ask: why is which fits a pre-existing solution. this device wearable (or garment- Unfortunately, this kind of reverse design integrated)? Would the device function process often leads to applications or better as a portable device? Better yet, the Article Designation: Refereed 3 JTATM Volume 4, Issue 3,Spring 2005 design process should start from an existing often a blocky, rigid