Smart Garment Management

Aaron ToneyDr Bruce H. Thomas

Wynand Marais

Wearable Computing LaboratoryUniversity of South Australia

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)

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.

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.

Adding Intelligence to Clothes Hangers

(Where our work started)

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.

Matthews et. all

Iso-Ketola et. al

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.

Expectation of Conventional Hangers

1. Individual hangers must be inexpensive.2. 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.

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

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.

Smart Wardrobes

(Where our work is going)

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”

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 )

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)

Questions?