BACKGROUND Clothing is largely presumed as being the mechanism by which house dust mites are distributed among locations in homes, yet little research to date has investigated the capacity with which various clothing fabric types serve as vectors for their accumulation and dispersal. Although previous research has indicated that car seats provide a habitat for mite populations, dynamics involve...

Restrictions of preterm newborns' movements could have consequences ranging from stress enhancement to impairment of their motor development. Therefore, ability to freely express motor activities appears crucial for their behavioural and physiological development. Our aim was to evaluate behavioural issues of two types of clothing used in NICU. We observed 18 healthy 34-37 post-conception week-...

By means of a computer-aided fashion design system, a fashion designer can easily make changes to the various colors, textures and pattern prints of clothing design, and thus need not draw on paper a great number of drafts. One of the most difficult tasks in a computer-aided fashion design system is to separate the clothing of interest on a model from the background, so that changes can be appl...

Sharp force violence is a common way of committing assault in numerous countries and regions around the world. When a stabbing occurs, the clothing worn by the victim may provide vital evidence: for example the weapon used to stab the victim may be identified from severance in the clothing. However, whether laundering the clothing after an attack affects the severance morphology of the fabric a...

Recent studies have noted positive effects of red clothing on success in competitive sports, perhaps arising from an evolutionary predisposition to associate the color red with dominance status. Red may also enhance judgments of women's attractiveness by men, perhaps through a similar association with fertility. Here we extend these studies by investigating attractiveness judgments of both sexe...

The goal of this research is to enable a robotic system to manipulate clothing and other highly non-rigid objects using an RGBD sensor. The focus of this thesis is to present various algorithms / models to solve parts of the laundry process (i.e. handling, classifying, sorting, unfolding, and folding). First, a system is presented for automatically extracting and classifying items in a pile of ...