Report of the meeting at Danielle’s place in Breda from 11 to 15 hours, 06/06/08. Present: Anja, Barbara and Danielle.
Ideally we want to do the sensing inside the material and not with separate sensors. There isĀ sensitive foam which responds to stretching and pressing. It is used to measure breathing, shoulder movement and shoulder blade pressure. We want to look into that. Anja knows where to buy this stuff.
We’ve decided on a framework for our first prototype. As the heart-rate sensor we’re working on is low tech and low cost we want to start with that. We want to display three states: low heart-rate, medium and high heart-rate. Using RGB LED’s we want to display these three states and alert the wearer and others what state you’re in. The RGB LED’s can change colour subtly. Low heart-rate is displayed in orange (stimulating), medium heart-rate in a neutral colour and perhaps a bigger area. Fast heart-rate is displayed in blue (calming) and placed in a discreet area.
For the wiring we want to use a laser cut-out from conductive fabric. This is less vulnerable then thread and looks a lot cooler š We can even use it on the outside of the shirt to underline the idea of transparency. We can do this fabric laser cutting at the textile museum in Tilburg.
The shirt is a sort of see-through shirt in the sense that it’s shows the hidden side of the wearer. In accordance with that we’re looking for a new name for our shirt. The name should suggest transparency or something like jelly fish, see-through, sense-through…
We looked at the heart-rate sensor Danielle made with Mathe. It’s a good starting point but it needs improving:
- The measurements must become stable. Where you’re not wearing it the values should be the same and not vary by itself. We want to look at different LED’s and light sensors.
- The pressure on the finger should not vary to make the measurements more stable. Barbara is going to look at a the design for that trying out different materials and constructions.
- The program must be fine tuned to make the results less rough. We can work on that once the input is more stable.
Anja is going to work on the output, Danielle is going to investigate the light sensors and LED’s on sensitivity and sizes, she’ll also look at RGB LED’s. Barbara is going to work on the sensor taking into account the points mentioned above.
Our next meeting will be in week 26.