Large Surface Area Electronic Textiles for Ubiquitous Computing: A System Approach

Electronic textile research often centers on the concept of introducing electronics to apparel such as shirts jackets, gloves, and health vests. Another less researched concept incorporates electronics into large textile surfaces such as carpets and upholstery. In this paper we explore methods and challenges of building a large surface area electronic textile floor for cooperative mobile device interaction. We systematically construct both a 100ft by 50ft textile simulation and a 3ft by 8ft working prototype using readily available materials. We introduce the broadly applicable embedded workload of human gait tracking as a means to defining the requirements for the textile physicals, networked computing node, and distributed execution environment subsystems. Through this effort we begin to establish a working model for combining inexpensive electronic textiles with a scalable execution environment that supports mobile device to floor interactions.