Making Dressing Easier: Smart Clothes to Help With Putting Clothes on Correctly

Dressing is an Activity of Daily Living (ADL) that can be difficult to do for individuals living with cognitive disorders and can, therefore, negatively impact their quality of life. Our research focuses on the development of an assistive robot and smart clothing system to aid a user with this ADL. In this paper, we present our autonomous Clothing Perception System that uniquely incorporates smart sensors into clothing in order to perceive if a person has worn the clothes correctly. Four different dressing states can be identified: correctly worn; partially worn; backwards; or inverted (inside out). Our novel system uses a combination of capacitive sensors, contact switches, an infrared LED and an RGB-D sensor to determine the dressing state. The multi-modal sensing system was integrated into a collared shirt and tested to verify its performance.Results with different individuals putting on the shirt showed that the system was able to perceive the four distinct dressing states for all of them.