Conventional mobility aids often remain bulky, rigid or difficult to wear for long periods. A new research effort is addressing this gap by developing assistive clothing in which sensing and actuation are built directly into textiles, allowing support to be delivered through garments that resemble ordinary apparel.
Wearables designed by Rice University engineers co-opt haptics, or communication based on the sense of touch, that could soon help the hearing impaired, in navigation and even those with limited vision among several other tasks.
Engineers at Rice University’s George R Brown School of Engineering have been able to embed pneumatic circuits into fabric for assistive garments. The lab’s logic-enabled textiles can be mass produced using existing clothes-manufacturing processes.
