Smart Clothing for Detecting Pressure-Sensitive Gestures

The increasing demand of wearable devices leads to evolving technologies within the smart industries field. Built-in sensors in fabrics represents a state of the art technology and open a new area in the development of smart systems. Smart sensor devices play an important role in the domains of healthcare, motion detection, sports and fitness. This paper presents the design, construction and evaluation of a piezoresistive woven fabric sewn into a wool glove which represents a versatile smart sensor tool for motion detection use cases. This wearable gesture sensing device provides a gesture-based realtime interaction with digital technologies as well as Virtual and Augmented Reality. We show in this paper that piezoresistive fabric proves to be a reliant sensing device due to the evaluation of resistance changes during stretch and strain. The paper includes research of wiring and electrical contacting of fabric patches to gain precise measurement results suppressing interferences caused by external factors like dermal contacts. The prototype, developed in this paper, shows detection of basic movements and gestures.