Context-awareness on a hoodie: Knowing when the hood is taken off the head

摘要

Development of conductive yarns have accelerated the natural integration of wearable computers into garments. However, the application to various types of clothing needs to be explored individually. A hoodie is one type of clothing that may be suited to interact with the head. For its operation, it is important to know when a user has put the hood on the head, or has taken it off the head. We introduce a hoodie that can automatically recognize the hood's position, not by equipping it with a dedicated sensing hardware, but by utilizing a conductive yarn based network that is built into the hoodie. Fabric Serial Bus (FSB) protocol is used to detect the change of electrical characteristic on the communication yarn, when the hood position changes.