Smart clothes offer emotional aid

Smart clothes could soon be helping their wearers cope with the stresses of modern life.

The prototype garments monitor physiological states including temperature and heart rate.

The clothes are connected to a database that analyses the data to work out a person's emotional state.

Media, including songs, words and images, are then piped to the display and speakers in the clothes to calm a wearer or offer support.

Created as part of an artistic project called Wearable Absence the clothes are made from textiles woven with different sorts of wireless sensors. These can track a wide variety of tell-tale biological markers including temperature, heart rate, breathing and galvanic skin response.

For more, read here.

Up Next! Workshops at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Bloomington June 7th-18th

Starting this week, over 30 youth will join us for their first introduction to computational textiles in a series of IU workshops at the Boys and Girls Club of Bloomington. We'll be meeting everyday from 3:30-5:30 from June 7th through June 18th. Lots of fun new projects on the horizon including paper airplanes, origami, letter pillows, t-shirts, interactive gloves, and POV wristbands embedded with simple circuits and LilyPad materials. Coming soon are new tutorials and instructables featuring new project ideas for kids! For more information contact Kylie Peppler at kpeppler@indiana.edu.

New DIY Article on Huffington Post

Hi Everyone,

Check out this brief article by Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine, on the merits of doing-it-yourself:

Apparently, he has a new book entitled Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, which focuses on the DIY ethic but also addresses working with both hand and mind.