LayTex: A Design Tool for Generating Customized Textile Sensor Layouts in Wearable Computing

Smart textile sensors have attracted increasing interest in the domain of wearable computing for human motion monitoring. Previous studies have shown that textile sensor layout has a major impact on the effectiveness and performance of wearable prototypes. However, it is still a trick and time-consuming issue to determine textile sensor layout in a quantitative approach as it involves figuring out the number, placement, and even orientations of sensors, yet there is no streamlined digital platform or tool specifically addressing this issue. In this paper, we introduce LayTex, a digital tool capable of generating layout proposals for personalized scenarios, which aims at facilitating designers and researchers to construct prototypes efficiently. The preliminary evaluation with designers on smart garments for scoliosis indicates that LayTex has great potential to lower the barriers and simplify the process of textile prototype construction.