Smart Garment Management

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Smart Garment Management

• Aaron Toney
• Dr Bruce H. Thomas
• Wynand Marais
• Wearable Computing Laboratory
• University of South Australia

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What is a Smart Garment?

• Wearable technology can be generally classified
  as either carried, deployable, body-mounted, or
  garment integrated.
• Smart garments are garments which contain
  integrated electronics for sensing, actuation,
  data processing, or communication. (Post 2000)

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Why do we need a smart garment management system?

• As the number of contextual applications
  exchanging data increases, the user becomes
  exponentially less likely to facilitate any user
  required action.
• To be successful any non trivial (24x7x the
  rest of your life) applications require that user
  action driving the system should be an extension
  of the users normal activity.

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Requirements of a Smart Garment Management System

1. Detect smart garments being inserted and removed
   from the wardrobe.
2. Provide any required charging and power for smart
   devices contained in the system.
3. Provides communication between all devices in the
   system.
4. Allow a mechanism for attaching information to
   individual garments.
5. Provide garment self diagnostics without
   requiring user participation or initiation.

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Adding Intelligence to Clothes Hangers

• (Where our work started)

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Other Hanger Based Systems

• A Mobile Device as User Interface for Wearable
  Applications Iso-Ketola, Karinsalom, Myry,
  Hahto, Karhu, Malmivaara, and Vanhala
• Augmenting Collections of Everyday Objects A
  Case Study of Clothes Hangers as an Information
  Display described by Matthews, Werner,
  Layerhoven, and Dey.

Iso-Ketola et. al
Matthews et. all
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Our contributions

• First to demonstrate providing both data the data
  and power needs of smart garments.
• Demonstrated a direct DC electrical connection
  for both data and power in a manner suitable for
  use in both single layer and composite garments.
• Ran a small user study to showing that both the
  smart hangers and the garment integrated
  technology required by this method are robust to
  to the uninformed user.

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Expectation of Conventional Hangers

• Individual hangers must be inexpensive.
• Smart hangers must be capable of operating while
  commingled with standard (non-smart) hangers.
• 3. Hangers must be able to be slid along the
  closet bar enabling searching, sorting, and
  compacting of the wardrobe.
• 4. Hangers must be able to be removed and
  replaced in any order.
• 5. Garments must be able to be hung on the
  hanger facing in either direction. (Rotational
  Symmetry)
• 6. Hanging garments must not require extensive
  or precise user participation.

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Garment Electrical Contacts

• Conductive cloth pads sewn into single layer
  garments
• Composite garments can use garment inserts.

Garment Conductive Pads
(Examples down in the demo space) Ex eSuit,
Shoulder Pads
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Smart Hanger Bus Connection

• Spring loaded contact maintains electrical
  contact as the garment settles or is disturbed.
• Recessed power bus this allows for
  conventionally shaped hangers to saddle the bar
  without shorting the bus.

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Smart Wardrobes

• (Where our work is going)

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Some Other Wardrobes

• Surprisingly not a lot of smart wardrobe /
  clothing management work has been done or even
  proposed!
• The Magic Wardrobe described by Dadong Wan -
  Magic Wardrobe Situated Shopping from Your Own
  Bedroom
• The Smart Dressing Table Described by Park,
  Won, Lee and Kim in Smart Home - digitally
  engineered domestic life

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What we are building!

• Narnia A Smart Garment Research Platform.
• Touch Screen Interface
• Inbuilt HBar smart hanger system
• RFID for garments that do not hang

( Narnia )
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The community needs user interface research
platform for smart wardrobes!

• (For those interested in the WCL will be making
  schematics and instructions available for
  building your own HBar systems)

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Questions?
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