4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services

Research Article

Large Surface Area Electronic Textiles for Ubiquitous Computing: A System Approach

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450979,
        author={David Graumann and Meghan Quirk and Braden Sawyer and Justin Chong and Giuseppe Raffa and Mark Jones and Tom Martin},
        title={Large Surface Area Electronic Textiles for Ubiquitous Computing: A System Approach},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBIQUITOUS},
        year={2008},
        month={2},
        keywords={Buildings  Computational modeling  Computer networks  Distributed computing  Embedded computing  Floors  Humans  Textiles  Ubiquitous computing  Virtual prototyping},
        doi={10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450979}
    }
    
  • David Graumann
    Meghan Quirk
    Braden Sawyer
    Justin Chong
    Giuseppe Raffa
    Mark Jones
    Tom Martin
    Year: 2008
    Large Surface Area Electronic Textiles for Ubiquitous Computing: A System Approach
    MOBIQUITOUS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/MOBIQ.2007.4450979
David Graumann1,*, Meghan Quirk2,*, Braden Sawyer2,*, Justin Chong2,*, Giuseppe Raffa3,*, Mark Jones2,*, Tom Martin2,*
  • 1: Intel Corp.
  • 2: Virginia Tech Dept. of ECE
  • 3: ARCES – University of Bologna
*Contact email: david.graumann@intel.com, quirk@vt.edu, bsawyer@vt.edu, jchong@vt.edu, graffa@arces.unibo.it, mtj@vt.edu, tlmartin@vt.edu

Abstract

Electronic textile research often centers on the concept of introducing electronics to apparel such as shirts jackets, gloves, and health vests. Another less researched concept incorporates electronics into large textile surfaces such as carpets and upholstery. In this paper we explore methods and challenges of building a large surface area electronic textile floor for cooperative mobile device interaction. We systematically construct both a 100ft by 50ft textile simulation and a 3ft by 8ft working prototype using readily available materials. We introduce the broadly applicable embedded workload of human gait tracking as a means to defining the requirements for the textile physicals, networked computing node, and distributed execution environment subsystems. Through this effort we begin to establish a working model for combining inexpensive electronic textiles with a scalable execution environment that supports mobile device to floor interactions.