Garment-based body sensing using foam sensors

Wearable technology is omnipresent to the user. Thus, it
has the potential to be significantly disruptive to the
user’s daily life. Context awareness and intuitive device
interfaces can help to minimize this disruption, but only
when the sensing technology itself is not physically
intrusive: i.e., when the interface preserves the user’s
homeostatic comfort. This work evaluates a novel foambased
sensor for use in body-monitoring for contextaware
and gestural interfaces. The sensor is particularly
attractive for wearable interfaces due to its positive
wearability characteristics (softness, pliability,
washability), but less precise than other similar sensors.
The sensor is applied in the garment-based monitoring of
breathing, shoulder lift (shrug), and directional arm
movement, and its accuracy is evaluated in each
application. We find the foam technology most successful
in detecting the presence of movement events using a
single sensor, and less successful in measuring precise,
relative movements from the coordinated responses of
multiple sensors. The implications of these results are
considered from a wearable computing perspective.