Clothing options

Jacket

Pros:

• Double layered, we can hide the cable

• Can be used for any occasion

Cons:

• Could be too warm in sporty sessions

Biking shirt

Pros:

• Makes clear the statement of the project

• It is fresh

Cons:

• Looks too sporty which decreases versatility

• Fabric is thin which makes difficult to hide the cable

• Keeping a smartphone in the back pocket could result awkward

General updates and considerations

• Tested speech recognition and works fairly well

• The surface of the microphone doesn’t need to be completely touching the throat or too tight to work 🙂

• It is difficult to prototype with tape on fabric, get an appropriate duct tape.

• By using the throat microphone as a collar it could generate discomfort. An option to avoid this is to remove the stiff part and leave only the cables.

To start, I did an initial and basic research about smart clothes and fabrics.
Then, after the discussion in class, I did some more research on the technical aspects, to see what’s available and try to combine the technologies into one or more interesting things.

First, the several times mentioned throat microphone. I think it is a good idea, depending on how close to the throat, we could integrate it in different ways. In addition to use such microphone to make phone calls the possibility of using speech recognition was mentioned. I have experience on speech recognition applications, and my suggestion would be to try several microphones exhaustively in different scenarios, identify the pros and cons of each of them and choose one or two. In my experience with normal microphones expensive doesn’t always mean better.

I have seen many people reading or writing messages using their smartphone while they ride their bike, this is quite dangerous. A guy who lives in my flat once fell and he was badly hurt, for example. As a proposal, I think it would be interesting to aim for an application which identifies an incoming message and asks the bike rider if he/she wants to hear the message (yes or no), then the answer is picked up via speech recognition and finally the message is “read” through text to speech.

25 €

12.50 €

12 €

I don’t remember if this one was shown by Florian but in case it was not I think it is a very good option to control any lights/leds that we want to integrate.

Lilypad Arduino – 22 €

http://www.amazon.com/LilyPad-Arduino-328-Main-Board/dp/B005K0LZ5O