Smart Textiles Plattform

How might we leverage smart textiles to enable computers to understand human emotions?

Challenge Brief

The Smart Textiles Platform Austria with its center in Vorarlberg is a worldwide unique merger of textile companies, whose competences cover all steps of the textile value chain. Besides initiating cooperative projects and opening up funding of national and international agencies. The Smart Textiles Platform aims at developing new solutions and products by using technical textiles. In order to restrict this extensive field, the focus now lies on smart textiles, sensor textiles, wearables and lightweight construction. All the knowhow concentrated in Vorarlberg helps to efficiently and effectively produce textile composites for example.

Today, our global economy consists of mainly two parts: products and services. In the next years, an increasing share of our economy will be based on experiences. Customers want experiences “that dazzle their senses, touch their hearts and stimulate their minds”. To craft satisfying experiences we need to understand emotions.

We believe we can facilitate better experiences if computers learn to feel. Computers today can store data, hear about microphones, watch with cameras, and now they also have artificial intelligence. But computers can not feel like humans. However, in the area of “user experience” it is imperative that computers learn this skill. Haptic perception will be a milestone in the further development of computers to support humans. Only when computers have tactile perceptions will there be new business models with user experience.

The term “tactile perception” refers to the surface sensitivity of the skin, the sense of touch and sensation. Through different receptors of the skin, we perceive various stimuli such as touch, pressure, temperature and pain.

How can a computer learn these feelings? How can computers decode the unpredictable world of human emotion? The “Smart Textiles Platform” has developed many textile sensors and actuators over the last few years. Pressure sensors, humidity sensors, temperature sensors, heating textiles or luminous textiles. These are collected in a smart-textile starter kit called WEARIC. How can we leverage WEARIC to help computers to feel?

At the InnoDays you are encouraged to use the WEARIC smart textile kit to create innovative ways to enable computers to understand human emotions. Come up with new ideas for how to leverage smart textiles to measure emotions. Help computers feel.

Collaboration Incentive

Will be announced soon.