uKnit: A Position-Aware Reconfigurable Machine-Knitted Wearable for Gestural Interaction and Passive Sensing using Electrical Impedance Tomography





Yu, Tianhong Catherine, Riku Arakawa, James McCann and Mayank Goel. "uKnit: A Position-Aware Reconfigurable Machine-Knitted Wearable for Gestural Interaction and Passive Sensing using Electrical Impedance Tomography" CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2023.
A scarf is inherently reconfigurable: wearers often use it as a headband, a neck wrap, a shawl, a wristband, and more. We developed uKnit, a scarf-like soft sensor with scarf-like reconfigurability, built with machine knitting and electrical impedance tomography sensing. Soft wearable devices are comfortable and thus attractive for many human-computer interaction scenarios. While prior work has demonstrated various soft wearable capabilities, each capability is device- and location-specific, being incapable of meeting users' various needs with a single device. In contrast, uKnit explores the possibility of one-soft-wearable-for-all. We describe the fabrication and sensing principles behind uKnit, demonstrate several example applications, and evaluate it with 10-participant user studies. uKnit achieves 88.0%/78.2% accuracy for 5-class worn-location detection and 80.4%/75.4% accuracy for 7-class gesture recognition with a per-user/universal model. It identifies respiratory rate with an error rate of 1.25 bpm and detects binary sitting postures with an average accuracy of 86.2%.