As Senseis Van Laerhoven and Cakmakci put it so well back at the turn of the cenury, “What shall we teach our pants?” [2].
The quest for smart trousers is still a mountain we have to climb, and researchers still pursue the summit.
This summer researchers at Federal University of Espirito Santo report on a prototype that has optic fiber channels embedded in the trousers, which continuously sense the motions of the pants and the person wearing them [1].
With measurements at as many as 30 points down the back of each legs, a neural network was trained to identify 6 different activities from the data. Unsurprisingly, the classifier can achieve 100% accuracy.
What’s this useful for? Well, that remains to be seen. This data is way, way overkill for a lot of everyday activity monitoring. The main advantage is going to be unobtrusive monitoring individual behavior, e.g., to detect anomalies or mobility issues for older people. In particular, long term monitoring can detect not just “different from the population in general moves”, but “different from how you moved last week”.
I have to say, pants-teaching technology has advanced greatly in this century! Way more sensor points; light, rugged, and safe optical networks; simple and absurdly powerful neural networks! This isn’t your fathers’ wearable computing!
In this case, it’s not that the dog can dance—this dog has been dancing for decades—but how wearable we can make the “wearable” technology.
The results are similar, but everything is so much easier and better a quarter century later.
I think the optic fiber technology is a good idea here because it is much more compatible with, well, trousers, than wires or radio. Now, there will be work to do to make this actually useable in garments. In the real world, stuff happens, including weather, oopsies, and laundry day. It will be necessary to make this rugged, comfortable, and washable.
And then—can you make it look good?
- Leticia Avellar, Anselmo Frizera, and Arnaldo Leal-Junior, POF Smart Pants: a fully portable optical fiber-integrated smart textile for remote monitoring of lower limb biomechanics. Biomedical Optics Express, 14 (7):3689-3704, 2023/07/01 2023. https://opg.optica.org/boe/abstract.cfm?URI=boe-14-7-3689
- Kristof Van Laerhoven and Ozan Cakmakci. What shall we teach our pants? In Digest of Papers. Fourth International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 2000, 77-83. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/888468
- Optica, Fiber optic smart pants offer a low-cost way to monitor movements, in Optica – News Releases, June 27, 2023. https://www.optica.org/en-us/about/newsroom/news_releases/2023/june/fiber_optic_smart_pants_offer_a_low-cost_way_to_mo/
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