Abstract

Abstract: Computational textiles that allow us to use everyday clothing as a substrate for sensing offers an promising new direction for wearable computing. In this talk, I will describe several examples of computational textiles that can measure a range of biometrics and can be literally “woven into the fabric of everyday life” as Mark Weiser articulated in his vision for ubiquitous computing. We demonstrate how we can imperceptibly modify everyday loose-fitting clothing made of materials such as cotton to design unconventional ways to sense physiological and electrical signals on the body. I will describe some of the challenges in designing smart textiles for wearable health sensing and describe examples involving triboelectric textiles, pressure-sensing textiles and gel electrodes in smart sleepwear to monitor` limb movements, cardio-respiratory rhythm, eye movements and brain signals. This work is done in collaboration with Trisha Andrew from Chemistry at UMass Amherst.

Bio: Deepak Ganesan is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst and Director of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring at UMass Amherst, a $40 million center for fabrication of new health sensing and intervention devices. His research focuses on ultra-low power backscatter communication, novel platforms and algorithms for mobile and wearable health sensing, learning and inference on multi-modal sensor data, and micro-energy harvesting. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.