A Layered Approach to Wearable Textile Networks

The integration of digital components into clothing is becoming an increasingly important segment in wearable computing research. The first indications for this trend are the incorporation of existing mobile technologies, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) or mobile phones, into jackets via flexible textile circuits. In the long term, other components could also be envisioned that are embedded in apparel, using a flexible bus-type network that links all the devices together. This paper introduces a functioning prototype of such a flexible network that not only allows communication between wearable components, but is also able to supply power to them. We propose an arrangement of layered textiles as opposed to the more traditional routed circuitry layout, which results in a novel approach towards the concept of a flexible clothing network.