Studies Towards E-Crafted RFID Smart Clothing for Daily Activities

Activities of daily living are self-care tasks repeatedly done daily, such as eating, bathing and dressing. Technology used to aid daily living is called assistive technology (AT) and is used to refer to all items and systems “used to increase, maintain, or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities” [9]. AT has been predicted to solve global challenges—significantly, those related to health monitoring and safety. For some reason, smart clothing has not been widely adopted in our daily living. It is apparent that wearable technology, and especially assistive smart clothing, is a complex device that should be perfectly fitted to user preferences to be fully adopted to daily living.

This thesis aims to advance studies towards self-customizable smart clothing for daily activities by utilizing versatile methods. It emphasizes personalized design over medical appearance, while considering early identification of primary users and their empathized preferences. The study also explores fabrication methodologies for customization and home fabrication using a needlework approach. The multimethod research was conducted by first organizing multidisciplinary ideation workshops, then developing needlework fabrication methodologies for cloth-based technology, and last, designing proof-of-concept prototypes of ATs. This research utilized low- energy-consuming technology, passive radiofrequency identification (RFID), for the following reasons: it has no internal batteries and the design can be kept relatively simple.

The key outcomes of this study are: First, assistive smart clothing supporting activities of daily living should be adaptive, aesthetically pleasing, effortlessly activated and technologically customizable. Secondly, innovative needlework-based e-crafting methodologies for passive UHF RFID tags are introduced. These include techniques for punch-needled tags and for hand-stitched versions, all of which can be customized in appearance. Last, two prototypes —the Smart Jacket and the Command Sleeve— are presented to support activities of daily living.