  E-textiles has received tremendous attention in recent years due to the
capability of integrating sensors into a garment to provide high precision
sensing of the human body. Besides sensing, a number of solutions for e-textile
garments have also integrated wireless interfaces allowing these sensing data
to be transmitted and also sensors that allow users to provide instructions
through touching. While this has provided a new level of sensing that can
result in unprecedented applications, there has been little attention placed on
on-body computing for e-textiles. Facilitating computing on e-textiles can
result in a new form of On-body Edge Computing, where sensor information are
processed very close to the body before being transmitted to an external device
or wireless access point. This form of computing can provide new security and
data privacy capabilities and at the same time provide opportunities for new
energy harvesting mechanisms to process the data through the garment. This
paper proposes this concept through embroidered Programmable Logic Array (PLA)
integrated into e-textiles. In the way that PLAs have programmable logic
circuits by interconnecting different AND, NOT and OR gates, we propose
e-textile based gates that are sewn into a garment and connected through
conductive thread stitching. Two designs are proposed and this includes Single
and Multi-Layered PLA. Experimental validations have been conducted at the
individual gates as well as the entire PLA circuits to determine the voltage
utilization as well as logic computing reliability. Our proposed approach can
usher in a new form of On-Body Edge Computing for e-textile garments for future
wearable technologies
