This week we further developed the muslin (rough draft of the jacket). It’s pretty much ready for testing with the electronics which we are planning to do tomorrow night. We have the accelerometer hooked up to the Arduino and providing somewhat consistent results. We are going to continue to work with the accelerometer data to get the functionality we need. Some challenges we ran into included redeveloping the original pattern so that the electronic elements will fit in. For this coming week we’re planning on testing electronics, getting the lights hooked up, finishing the jacket, and making our poster.

Sorry this is late! Last week’s updates:

Andrew- This week I worked with the electronics to help make sense of the accelerometer data. We found that the pro mini would not work for our project so I ordered new electronics that I look forward to hooking up on Tuesday.

Emma- This week I continues to work on the muslin and ordered the final fabrics. I wanted to order two tones of fabric, a lighter gray and a charcoal. I got a call from the woman packing my order a couple days later telling me that they were out of one of the grays so I chose a red instead. Challenges I ran into include basic draping/sizing challenges since I haven’t done much of it in the past.

The accelerometer issues and slow draping set us back a little bit but we plan on catching up next week.

Emma- The materials we ordered finally came in this week! We received a ton of fabric samples to choose from and are planning to make a final decision on Tuesday. We also began creating a muslin of the jacket (a test garment made out of inexpensive fabric). This has been a little challenging and time consuming because I don’t have a ton of experience with draping, let alone menswear, but I feel confident that I will make a lot of progress on it in this upcoming week. As long as I make that kind of progress this week, we should be on schedule!

Andrew- I’ve continued to have a bit of trouble prototyping the circuit on the breadboard, so this week I soldered the components to a circuit board, and look forward to testing it further next week.

My idea of a new wearable technology would be to have a bracelet or some other similar accessory that would be able to detect illness before it happened. You could simply breathe your germs all over the device in order for it to pick up dangerous germs. As it detected the beginning of the cold, flu, etc, it would alert the wearer and send a health recommendation or prescription (if needed) to the wearer’s email. Ideally it would be able to detect the beginning stages of more serious illnesses- cancer, diabetes, etc. so that the wearer could take action immediately.
The detection of more serious illnesses would be a challenge…any illness that requires drawn blood could become a problem. Perhaps it could act similar to a diabetes blood monitoring system?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324375300/vest-a-sensory-substitution-neuroscience-project?ref=category

Dr. David Eagleman and Scott Novich from Baylor College of Medicine are working on developing a vest designed to convert sounds into vibrations that can be felt by the person wearing the vest. The vest will help deaf people process sounds in a similar way that a cochlear implant would, but in a way that will be thousands of dollars cheaper.

This particular project interested me because my sister is studying to be a sign language interpreter. The success of this project could potentially make her career path obsolete in the future, which she’ll be excited to hear!

Even though it could eliminate the need for interpreters, I think the vest is a great exploration of the versatility of human senses and could really benefit those who are blind, deaf, etc.

There aren’t any textiles involved in this innovation but I thought it was too cool to not post. It was posted back in 2011 so maybe I’m just out of the loop, but MSR researchers developed “OmniTouch” a projected touchscreen system that allows you to project and interact on almost any surface, eliminating the need for a static computer screen. The article comes with a video demo of the projector –

http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/10/17/video-microsoft-research-cmu-take-covers-off-omnitouch-touchscreen-projector/