After reading Tyler’s May 2020 post “Wearable technology“, I was curious about advances that may have been made in this area. I was specifically interested in smart clothing and smart fabrics, as this is an area I haven’t explored until now.
In my online exploration, I came across two videos from university design teams that are doing interesting work in the field of smart clothing. In the first video, the MIT team is exploring how their fabric can help improve how people move, their posture and even how the fabric can be used to alert support workers or family members in the event of a fall.
Researchers at Purdue University have also been experimenting with smart fabrics. They’ve taken this one step further and have developed a battery-free wearable! In my mind, this tied in nicely with some of the discussion points from both Marlis and the Reviewers/Commenters of her A Truly Mobile Battery post.
Before diving into these resources and the previous posts, I was much more focused on wearables in the form of smartwatches and connected glasses or ARV/VR/MR headsets. Now that I’ve taken the time to think of it, I can see some interesting opportunities for teaching and learning using smart clothing and connected fabrics.
Some examples:
•physical education, I feel this could have been particularly interesting in university Human Kinetics courses during remote learning
•coupled with a VR headset this could really add to the immersive quality of a simulation
I would love to hear other examples of how smart clothing or connected fabrics could influence, enhance or disrupt teaching & learning.
I thought this technology offered so many new options for education and was very interested in both the videos you posted so thank you Megan! In thinking about my special education students in elementary/high school, I think there are a variety of applicable uses that could greatly benefit students. Currently school and school boards spend a great deal of funding on sensory items and sensory rooms and the these are specifically designed to help students feel calm. I think that wearable technology could be integrated with sensory items or rooms to assist students and educators especially for students who are non verbal and not able to articulate their needs or feelings. If the wearable technology could be used to provide a sensory experience while gathering data on the user, it could be beneficial for students in special education especially those on the autism spectrum. Being able to monitor the effectiveness of wearable technology for non verbal students could allow educators to gain a better understanding of how to meet their needs, program effectively and use sensory items to help them to regulate their feelings. If we were able to monitor levels of excitement, agitation, calm, frustration through wearable technology and their physiological responses it would eliminate much of the current guess work that is used when trying to determine what will work best for each student.
This is a great take Megan.
Some of the PE ones are already developed and are used by pro (and well funded amateur) sports teams. I’m most familiar with rugby and hockey where the sensors, being tied in to a GPS system, can track a players exact locations at all times leading statistics nerds to go berserk. The physiologists among us are also able to track things like heart rate from the coaches’ box.
My school’s PE department played with a phone based tracker during online learning last year to mixed success. The cynical me noted that it was only a matter of time before someone monetized it. https://youtu.be/_mT9adm5jIA
I was a part of a PE team in 2013 that used class sets of wearable heart rate monitors to give students immediate feedback on their running. Imagine the physical literacy learning that could go on if every student could track their effort in real time.