SimpleSkin
ACTLab Activities
The particular focus of ACTLab in SimpleSkin is on activity recognition and behaviour inference and patient state interpretation from textile sensor patches in natural free living conditions. For this purpose, new sensor designs are investigated in our lab and proposed for the demonstrators of SimpleSkin. In addition, ACTLab contributes to the GarmentOS, signal artefact identification, and sensor fusion algorithm development in the project. Finally, as application demonstrators, ACTLab develops dietary monitoring solutions.
Current works include:
- GarmentOS architecture: decoupling the application development from the underlying sensing hardware in smart cloths.
- A hierarchical approach for artefact compensation in smart garments.
- Hands-free gesture controlled user interfaces worn as textile electrode patch around the neck (collaboration with DFKI Kaiserslautern).
Innovation
The SimpleSkin project proposes a fundamentally new approach to wearable sensing that will provide an unprecedented amount of information on the wearer’s activities and physiological parameters with clothes that, with respect to their properties, appearance, production process, and price will be virtually undistinguishable from today’s standard garments. In the long term, this will lead to functional clothes becoming the default, much like how today’s smart, sensor enabled phones.
In this project we aim to use physiological parameters such as pulse, ECG, or breathing rate as objects of long term and everyday monitoring and to develop technological and methodological foundations for the next generation of personal monitoring systems. To this end, the project will build on the concept of an “Electronic Skin” that has been at the forefront of wearable sensing research for a long time, but had so far only very little impact. The vision is to sense not just isolated parameters at isolated locations but to be able to acquire, with high spatial and temporal resolution, a broad variety of signals from large areas of the body simultaneously, including activities, various physiological parameters, and indicators of emotional state (e.g. arousal or stress). An electronic skin can also reveal information about the users’ interaction with the environment (mostly through physical contact) and environment conditions.
Using this information, new ways of human-computer interaction could be established beyond existing technologies. In the project we will (1) develop the technology for a cheap and powerful electronic skin, (2) create concepts and prototypes of future applications using SimpleSkin, and (3) will look at how implicit and explicit interaction can be realized based on such an electronic skin. Our vision is to build the foundations for taking the concept of electronic skin from today’s status of a laboratory curiosity to cheap easily deployable mainstream consumer technology. If our approach is successful, we envision that SimpleSkin will become the basis for an entirely new textile industry in Europe.
About
SimpleSkin is a Future Emerging Technologies (FET) Open project aiming at a fundamentally new approach to wearable sensing that will provide an unprecedented amount of information on the wearer’s activities and physiological parameters. SimpleSkin is a collaborative project co-funded under the European Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), FET Open programme. SimpleSkin started in July 2013 and had a duration 36 months.
By effectively utilising textiles as substrate for sensing and processing functions that can be loaded like apps on smartphones today, SimpleSkin will provide a fundamentally new approach to wearable sensing with unprecedented amount of information on the wearer’s activities and physiological parameters. SimpleSkin targets smart clothes that in appearance, production process, and price, will be virtually undistinguishable from today’s standard garments.
More information on the project can be found on the project website.
Media coverage
See EuroNews TV report: Smart Fashion: What do our clothes say when they talk to us?
Publications (selection)
[publication-list ids=”EIA8B83K,SV9VVZXW,CBBPR9DS,QR2WPIKW,2NHRNWZE,ZRPUZFZJ,VQIFJZRW”]
Please see also the book page: Smart Textiles: Fundamentals, Design and Interaction
Full text is available from our publications page.
Contact
Rui Zhang
- Job title: Researcher
- Phone number: +49 9131 85-23604
- Email: rui.rui.zhang@fau.de