Architecture of smart clothing for standardized wearable sensor systems

The field of wearable computing has great implications in the measurement of the human body and its surrounding environment, with potentially high impact in medical applications such as early detection, treatment, compliance monitoring, care for the frail and elderly, telemedicine, physical therapy, etc. Unfortunately, the field of wearable computing is still held back by the lack of a standardized framework and development process, forcing developers into custom and time intensive solutions. In this paper, the current progress of development of a universal smart textile system is discussed which would solve this problem and accelerate the field of smart wearable electronics, providing a universal platform for attaching several hundreds of sensors to clothing in convenient, unobtrusive and energy efficient ways. The main problems and potential solutions discussed in this article include power and data transfer wire topology, allowing the textile to be arbitrarily cut and sewn into smart clothing, data transmission architecture, providing high bandwidth and low energy data transfer, and support for miniaturization and elasticity, making the potential end product as unobtrusive as possible.