The interplay of electronic textiles and wearable technology with fashion, design and science is a highly promising subject nowadays. I tried to join in my project emotion and technology developing wearable interfaces, electronic textiles, telecommunication services and interactive media and installations.
Nowadays new technology and interactive architecture is used in fashion design, for example in the construction of ’smart’ garments that light up, generate heat, speak when touched, and change colour. But, can we use new technology for designing something that can save our lives and not only for fun? for sick people which need to inform their doctors about their health? I want to produce smart clothes for sick people, combining the technology developed for biomedical signals acquisition with the use of sensitized garments to create high-tech and high-quality products.
This project focuses in designing a T-shirt for epilepsy’s people and an the other hand study the dynamics of responsive environments and the mediated means available in contemporary culture.
Doctors cannot establish the reason of this sickness, but we know their causes and that early invention is important because from this few minutes before attack we can saved epileptic’s peoples from it, so it is possible to use simple warning techniques to notify people about dangerous exposures.
But there are warning symptoms that can announce epileptic attack, such as the raising temperature in the human body. Normally body temperature is 36.6 Celsius degrees, but temperature of epilepsy’s body few minutes before attack can be higher about 2,3 Celsius degrees. This depends of their age, sex ,pulse ,life style etc.
We can measure body temperature in 4 points in back: under our arms, on our back,. The front under our arms ,between our buttocks and near our neck.
By analysing top and back points and comparing them we can generate a grid that can be used to warn patients.
The diagrams show how the temperature grows point by point in the back and front.
The connection between points generate a human body map, which are arranged in a triangulation body grid.
Colour coding (red, orange, green, blue) show specialised in what kind of temperature we have in which part of our body and I can put the electronic elements which will measure the temperature.
I developed my first collection spring/summer 2008 t-shirt especially designed for epileptic people. In the next year I want to design a new collection. I want to propose that a t-shirt for medical use can be functional, technologically advanced and at the same time offer colour and individually as a fashion line.
The t-shirt must be tailored for every individual because each of us have completely different body matrix. This project intents to study the relationship between environment and subject in two different forms: from human to an external informational system and as a way to describe and map dynamic environments.
When human inform the environment that something is happened. The information can be passed along to computer systems in the hospitals to create individual profile of the person (personality of sickness, pulse, temperature).
The second is communication way of an describing the context thru codification of context and application to more general design. It is possible to use the body to describe a text history or to create maps of conditions at a larger scale, for instance highly intense lighting areas, noise, pollution, allergies, motion etc. This mapping will allow useful information for sensitive individuals to know where are potential dangers.
