Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology

By : Christine Farion
Book Image

The Ultimate Guide to Informed Wearable Technology

By: Christine Farion

Overview of this book

Wearable circuits add interaction and purpose to clothing and other wearable devices that are currently widely used in medical, social, safety, entertainment, and sports fields. To develop useful and impressive prototypes and wearables, you’ll need to be skilled in designing electronic circuits and working with wearable technologies. This book takes you on an interesting journey through wearable technology, starting from electronic circuits, materials, and e-textile toolkits to using Arduino, which includes a variety of sensors, outputs, actuators, and microcontrollers such as Gemma M0 and ESP32. As you progress, you’ll be carefully guided through creating an advanced IoT project. You’ll learn by doing and create wearables with the help of practical examples and exercises. Later chapters will show you how to develop a hyper-body wearable and solder and sew circuits. Finally, you’ll discover how to build a culture-driven wearable to track data and provide feedback using a Design Innovation approach. After reading this book, you’ll be able to design interactive prototypes and sew, solder, and program your own Arduino-based wearable devices with a purpose.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Wearable Technology and Simple Circuits
6
Part 2:Creating Sewable Circuits That Sense and React Using Arduino and ESP32
10
Part 3:Learning to Prototype, Build, and Wear a Hyper-Body System
14
Part 4:Getting the Taste of Designing Your Own Culture-Driven Wearable and Beyond

Summary

Prototyping is an essential part of good wearable design. It often helps to spark ideas, conversations, and ways of improving what we’ve made. This chapter explored different types of prototypes and how they can contribute to creating the iterations of our wearables to make them successful.

We looked at how we can make wearables usable, considering the placement and ease of use. Alongside that, we considered usability, the user’s ability, and learnability. There are memorability and environmental factors too. We learned about making our wearable function effectively to allow a wearer to achieve their goals, and also how the system needs to be acceptable and comfortable. The chapter finished with a look at materials. We learned about fabrics and that starting with a denim or felt type of fabric, because of its stability and durability, might be a good first choice. We also saw that although neoprene is very movable, it also makes for a great near-body system...