Clothing-based wearable sensors for unobtrusive interactions with mobile devices

Abstract

The clothing materials are ubiquitous part of our everyday life for thousands of years. However, despite this they have largely not been considered as an input surface in human device interactions, but that is until more recently as today's developments of wearable sensors, that are small and flexible in nature, have open this platform. The clothing materials' shape-changing nature enables the users to perform gestures (e.g., bend or stretch) not possible when compared to the interaction methods of flat touchscreens of mobile devices. In addition, the clothing-based interfaces by default have the unique advantage of being placed anywhere on the body and always being with the wearers and their devices. In this paper, we validate the use of clothing-based wearable sensors to support interacting with mobile devices and present some challenges to be overcome for clothing-based interfaces to be adopted more widely.