Energy efficient E-Textile based portable keyboard

Abstract

We have created sensor architecture, data collection and processing techniques for an E-Textile wireless keyboard. We leverage the inherent properties of E-Textiles to produce optimized architecture for energy efficient sensing. Novel techniques such as one where each sensor senses several events (activations of different keys) and each event is sensed by three sensors and flexible interleaved sensing and data processing result in up to a factor of 30 energy reduction over the system where each key is sensed by exactly one sensor. We build the keyboard and test it on multiple subjects.