Smart fabrics’ informed touch can tell you where to go

Personal devices feed our sight and hearing virtually unlimited streams of information while leaving our sense of touch mostly … untouched.

A wearable, textile-based device developed by Rice University engineers could help declutter, enhance — and, in the case of impairments — compensate for deficiencies in visual and auditory inputs by tapping this underused sensory resource.

“Technology has been slow to co-opt haptics or communication based on the sense of touch,” said Barclay Jumet, a mechanical engineering PhD student who is the lead author on a study published in Device. “Of the technologies that have incorporated haptics, wearable devices often still require bulky external hardware to provide complex cues, limiting their use in day-to-day activities.”

The system of haptic accessories built by the Rice labs of Daniel Preston and Marcia O’Malley reduces the need for hardware by programming haptic cues into the textile structure of the wearables using fluidic control, building on an approach described in prior work.

https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/smart...

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