Special Issue _____ Real-time Motion Learning System
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Smart Transformation of “Clothes”:
Correcting the Postures of Wearers
Smart Wear with IT Technology
As time has changed, the design of clothes has been emphasized along with their function. We are now living in a world where what we wear becomes smart as ICT technology is converged into clothes. Smart fiber can transmit physical information and automatically increase its temperature, and other advanced technologies are on the way.
Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute or ETRI has succeeded in developing smart wear technology that corrects wearers’ wrong postures. This is a technology allowing real-time learning based on a human motion database. Especially in medical treatment, rehabilitation, musical instrument education, and sports activities, smart wear where human motion data are stored in a DB and developed into content can help the prevention and treatment of diseases caused by wrong postures in daily life by improving and correcting the postures and movement in real time in the learning process of leisure or sports activities through a three-dimensional comparison and analysis.
Posture Correction through Sensor
Smart wear, a smart motion learning system developed by ETRI, is a combination of SOT (System on Textile)-based intelligence Interactive fiber technology and multi-channeled sensing networking technology. Wrong postures are corrected as 17 sensors and 10 actuators attached to the main joints of a human body send a vibration signal when a three-dimensional comparison and analysis finds a mismatch between the movement of a relative object and that of the wearer. Data values accumulated from the sensors include angles of joints and three-dimensional location coordinates. Sensors and actuators are attached to the top clothes while those for the bottom are reproduced as a detachable band type. Conveniently, you can attach them to the thighs, calves, or ankles when necessary. Smart wear system for spinal disease prevention has an elastic property produced by meshing signal and power wires, representing the most advanced smart wear. It corrects wrong postures in real time as four inertia sensors measure and evaluate postures and four vibration actuators are located at the shoulder blade and the collarbone where the detection of the devices functions very well. This help learners to shorten the time they spend to adopt the correct postures. Furthermore, cost savings is another benefit that smart wear brings about as it is possible to provide scientific customized education, resulting in maximizing learning efficiency. It can be controlled from a remote area as well. For example, a teacher living in Seoul can correct the postures of a student who lives in a city far from Seoul by watching his or her movement through Internet. Is the function of smart wear undermined after washing? Smart wear is made of conductive yarn that can be used for embroidery production, and ETRI researchers have proven that 90 percent of electrical resistance of the smart wear remains unchanged in 100 iterations of bending tests and 5 iterations of circuit connection tests after washing.
Smart Wear System Applicable to Various Fields, including Medical Treatment and Sports
The achievements ETRI has made with smart wear technology can be divided into three categories: clothes for spinal disease prevention, clothes for golf motion learning, and real-time interactive golf learning content.
The clothing preventing spinal disease uses four inertia sensors to measure and assess the wearer’s postures. If the person assumes an improper posture, a vibration device is activated to correct it. The golf learning clothing has good wearability, and it is produced as a band type outfit that has an excellent signal transmitting property. This is a smart wear for golf learning that is capable of real time posture correction through the provision of tailored training courses to a beginner, an intermediate and an advanced learner, and through the analysis of swing postures by step. ETRI also developed real-time interactive golf learning contents with which a professional golfer can teach students through online as well as offline. The new IT convergence smart wear technology developed by ETRI is expected to be applicable to education, medical welfare, leisure sports and other various fields, ultimately making a huge contribution to welfare promotion and life quality improvement. Furthermore, the technology is also expected to create high added-values by converging IT technology with the fiber industry, transforming the labor-intensive industry into an advanced, knowledge-intensive one.
