Garment locating sensors

A. Love, Automatically Locating Sensor Position on an E-textile Garment via Pattern Recognition (M.S. thesis), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, September 2009. 

The sensing modules developed in [15] were attached to the connectors, as shown in Fig. 27.8. These ribbons can be shifted up and down the wearer s limbs and can be secured with yarn. Due to the sensors being physically similar to the ones used in the woven jumpsuit with an on-fabric network garment, the communication structure is similar. The sensor nodes are located on approximately the same points on the body as they were in the jumpsuit with the woven on-fabric network the torso and the midpoint of each limb segment (upper arm, forearm, thigh, and shin) [1,10,15]. 

The first application that was built using the first version of the garment (the woven jumpsuit) was one that can automatically identify where a sensor is located on the garment. More details about this application can be found in [11]. 

A simple solution would be to include hard-coded identification or location information for each sensor node, but this presents drawbacks in mass production of the nodes and needs a considerable amount of additional work to be performed when setting up the garment and making sure that each sensor is in the correct location. Furthermore, whenever a node fads, it could not be replaced with any other available node it should be replaced with a node having the same programmed information. Another way to solve this problem would be for the user to include some kind of input on the sensor node to specify its location after connecting it, but this will add more complexity to the node and requires more work from the user. 

The initial application for the jumpsuit was a method for automatically detecting the position of each sensor on the garment, given fixed known locations about where each... 

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