E-textiles: toward computational clothing

Sundaresan Jayaraman wants to have fun with his students. At each semester’s beginning, he offers his students an A in the class if they are interested only in the grade. He doesn’t want to teach people who are there just for the grade. So far, nobody has taken him up on the offer. Jayaraman, an electronic-textiles pioneer at Georgia Tech, has been integrating information into clothing and textiles for the past eight years. Clothing, he says, is the universal interface. It comes naturally to people in society. Everyone knows its use and primary purpose for protection from the elements. Clothing provides strength and flexibility in a structure that can be used for processing the information that we need to obtain knowledge to make good business and personal decisions. People not only want to make good decisions with technology, but they also want both connectivity to everyone all the time and ease of use. The enabling technologies for this include electronics, sensors, computing, and communication. Combining users’ wants with enabling technologies creates a structure that embodies innovation and intelligence and integrates users’ wants in a useful structure. Doing this creates a computer in the textile. The fabric is the computer. These fabrics have large areas, which makes embedding sensors and processing elements feasible. This also makes building fault tolerance through redundancy feasible, which is important when dealing with textile networks and communication. Communication is not the only issue— what about computation? Where will it take place? On the fabric? In the fabric? Or outside the fabric? This is a big research issue and will be decided as textile systems are developed. As designers develop these systems, reusability and design methodologies are key issues that they will have to resolve for the designs to succeed. If an e-textile system’s life cycle is more than six months, multiple groups of developers will be involved in the initial development, deployment, and maintenance of the systems in the field. Ad hoc solutions will not be the right answer. Jayaraman has experienced many cases of developers designing systems that are not friendly to expansion and further development after the first version is released. Jayaraman is working in conjunction with SensaTex, a company developing We are delighted to bring you in this volume of IEEE Pervasive Computing a new department that highlights and summarizes conferences, workshops, and symposia in pervasive computing and related areas. We intend these summaries to focus on the meetings’ most dynamic, interactive aspects—the parts you cannot absorb simply through reading technical proceedings. Our contributors are therefore conference attendees who have set out to record and summarize the discussions that follow the technical presentations, the discussions that take place during panel sessions, and the overall contents and reactions to keynote addresses and other conference events. We hope these relatively informal articles will lead you to feel you have almost attended the gatherings. Perhaps you will even find out about events you want to participate in sometime in the future. In this first instalment, we are happy to bring you Diana Marculescu and her team’s excellent summary of the First Workshop on Modeling, Analysis, and Middleware Support for Electronic Textiles. For more on MAMSET and some of the research mentioned in this article, see the sidebars later in this article. As your editor for this department, I would like to welcome you and solicit your comments and suggestions for future conference coverage. If you are interested in contributing to this department, please contact me at mgbaker@cs.stanford. edu. I look forward to offering you summaries of many future events in this exciting field. —Mary Baker EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION