Electronic Textiles for Autonomous Location Awareness

Abstract

The mature textile industry coupled with our familiarity and comfort level with fabrics and the possibility of seamless integration of electronic components such as sensors, processors, and power sources in the fabric opens up a new dimension of computing. The electronic textile presents a suitable substrate over which numerous applications can be developed. Location awareness is one such application that can reap the benefits of e-textiles such that it can be widely deployed at a reasonable cost for assisting visually impaired people or to provide navigational help during emergency situations. This thesis describes an autonomous, wearable location awareness system that will determine a user's location within a building given a map of that building. The thesis examines the issues, constraints, and challenges concerning the design of such a system. The two-part location awareness algorithm computes the location and orientation within a room as well as determines the user's movement between rooms. The efficacy of the proposed system is demonstrated with a wearable prototype.