I was inspired by the self-contained on-skin pcb for the hand, where placement of electronic components are separated into individual PCB islands, then distributed over the body surface, and connected through a novel skin-wiring approach that deposits conformal multi-stranded metallic wires on thin silicon substrates through a sewing-based technique.
The similar approach of creating PCB islands can be applied to woven fabric too. The major question here would be how would these PCB islands be integrated into the woven fabric? And what activity recognition/sensing can it accomplish?
Revised project statement
A piece of woven fabric integrated with small electronic components. The woven fabric has such qualities:
- Electronic components aren’t visually obvious
- Electronic components do not affect the softness and the flexibility of the fabric
- The Fabric can sense a ‘thing’/things that rely on hard components(i.e. beyond capacitive touch/slider sensors).
Hsin-Liu Cindy Kao, Abdelkareem Bedri, and Kent Lyons. 2018. SkinWire: Fabricating a Self-Contained On-Skin PCB for the Hand. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 2, 3, Article 116 (September 2018), 23 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3264926