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

How to design your hyper-body system – choosing materials, components, and purpose

We’ve completed several activities throughout the book and they have become increasingly complex. In this section, we’ll look at designing your own hyper-body system and what you should consider as part of your wearable design process.

The many forms our wearables can take include socks, vests, underwear, scarves, wristbands, gloves, hats, belts, jewelry, and near-body items such as purses, handbags, and backpacks. How will you choose the form for your project? Making decisions about how to protect or secure your circuitry for a wearable is an important factor to think through as part of your planning. In a hyper-body system, we may have sensors or outputs in several locations. This has an impact on their placement too.

As the complexities of our circuits increase, you may decide to move from the typical placement of components on top of the fabric to a more incorporated...