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

Innovating, with a Human-Centered Design Process

The Design Innovation process can be used to create relevant and socially conscious wearables that can highlight gaps in our thinking. Through a human-centered design process, we seek depth and meaning through the interactions we create. Using insights from listening to people, we can appreciate the benefits of human-centered design practice. This chapter explains some Design Innovation processes we can take and repeat in our own projects and designs. The chapter provides frameworks and guidance on how to conduct research for wearable projects so that humans are respected and considered.

In this chapter, you will explore Design Innovation to work toward creating an informed wearable. We will learn about scoping a project, getting to know the problem, stakeholder mapping, engagement, gaps in the field, human-centered design, co-design (or codesign) and participatory design, sense-making, prototyping, testing, and iterating. That looks...