As technology becomes part of daily life, the next interface could be in what you wear.
Queen’s researchers are developing smart textiles that combine fabric with digital sensors for health tracking, accessibility, and hands-free control. Founded in 2021, the lab is led by Dr. Sara Nabil, director of the iStudio Lab and assistant professor in the Queen’s School of Computing.
Smart textiles are described as materials that can sense stimuli from the environment and react to them. Smart textiles incorporate conductive elements and embedded sensors that enable them to detect environmental changes–electrical, mechanical, thermal, or chemical–in real time. This means a shirt could monitor a person’s heart rate or athletic wear could measure muscle activity during a workout–making technology more seamless, comfortable, and accessible.
Unlike traditional wearable technology that has to be put on and worn, these textiles function as the fabric itself. In an interview with The Journal, Dr. Nabil explained the difference between currently available wearable technology and smart textiles.
“Wearable technology usually relies on adding electronic components on top of things that you can wear. What we’re doing is making your favourite garment have the sensing capabilities woven within it. People can’t tell that they’re interacting with a device; it’s very natural, like real textiles.”
The strongest applications for this research can be seen in healthcare, where smart textiles can be woven into clothes and furniture to help detect patients’ vital signals, such as breathing rate, but also detect accidents such as falls.
“Imagine if your favourite jumper or pyjamas are already detecting your breathing pattern, or if the bathroom rug in your grandma’s care home is detecting if she falls,” Nabil said.
Apart from assisting patients, it can be useful for those who may refuse to wear wearable technology, such as smart watches. Nabil explains that the Smart Textiles have ‘potential’ for people who are blind, as they would be able to touch and feel things they wouldn’t be able to do with graphical interfaces.
One challenge with wearable tech is that it’s heavily dependent on user motivation and intention, since you must remember to strap on, sync, and tolerate a device on your body. Smart textiles eliminate that cognitive burden as sensing is embedded into the fabric, allowing the technology to fit into the users’ existing routines.
In fact, research published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association has shown that once the novelty effect fades, users quickly abandon wearables. “People tend to buy smartwatches and gadgets, and then after a few weeks they abandon them,” Nabil said. “It’s not part of our natural daily routine. It’s alien. It’s imposed.”
Of course, weaving technology into a tool that gathers data directly from the user raises concerns about data privacy, security, and ethics. However, Dr. Nabil’s lab builds consent and agency from the beginning.
“At the end of the day, we’re the interaction designers. We get to decide how technology is used in ethical ways,” Nabil added. “We never program prototypes to collect data all the time. We co-design with people what kind of data should be collected and when.”
Ultimately, smart textiles represent a vision of computing that blends into everyday life, rather than the big, shiny gadgets the tech industry tends to push. “I love the idea of technology being hidden in the background, becoming ubiquitous,” Nabil said. “We’re [individuals in society] not forced to adopt a new gadget or remind ourselves to use it.”
Tags
assistive technology, intelligence, Textiles
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