Amazing wearable tech garment from CuteCircuit
http://www.cutecircuit.com/
The F+R Hugs (Hug Shirt): is a shirt that allows to exchange the physical sensation of a hug over distance. Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warmth and emotion of the hug to the shirt of the distant loved one.
The System
The F+R Hugs is a Bluetooth accessory for Java enabled mobile phones. Hug shirts don’t have any assigned phone number, all the data goes from the sensors wirelessly to your mobile phone and your mobile phone delivers the data stream to your loved one phone and seamlessly is transmitted Bluetooth to the other person’s shirt (sounds complex but the operation takes the same few seconds it would take to send an SMS, or text message). You will be able to send hugs while you are on the move, in the same way and to the same places you are able to make phone calls (Rome to Tokyo, New York to Paris).
The system is very simple: a hug shirt (Bluetooth with sensors and actuators), a Bluetooth java enabled mobile phone with the Hug Me java software running (that understands what the sensors are communicating), and on the other side another phone and another shirt.
The hug shirt can be washed. The technology sandwiches (containing sensors and actuators), placed under each circle you see in the pictures, can be removed for washing and placed back in afterwards. In the same way the hug can be customized: total body or just around the shoulders, and so on. The tech sandwiches are plug and play, so that you don’t need to be an expert to place them and make it work! The hug shirts are available in many colors, so that you can move the tech sandwiches from shirt to shirt and remain fashionable.
(image placeholder)
When touching the sensors on your shirt your mobile receives the data (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, and the name of the person you want to hug) and delivers it to the other person. If the other person or the sender doesn’t have the shirt she can just send an SMS text message, and it will be transformed into a hug! If you don’t need a hug you can switch it off.
The operation cost is the same of sending SMS, depending on your service provider (in Italy is very inexpensive). The hugs shirt is Bluetooth and works with mobile phones on any bandwidth (900 Mhz, 1800 Mhz and so on). Runs on rechargeable batteries. The Hug Shirt is built using RoHS components, it means that the Hug Shirt is lead-free and non-toxic.
Research
F+R Hugs started as a collaborative project with Interaction Designer and friend Rikako Sakai, and is an ongoing innovation project at CuteCircuit were we are further developing the concept through additional intensive participatory design sessions, questionnaires, interviews, iterative prototyping and body storming with 150 to 200 users in many countries and of many different nationalities, studying people behavior and emotions, to create a design respondent to all the qualities needed by users of different age and cultural groups.
Interfaces and systems must be intuitive, natural, and compatible with our emotional status. Combining emotion and technology should be part of every design process. An increasing mobility of humans throughout the globe, due to business or study reasons, has brought family members to spend most of their time apart from each other. F+R Hugs could fill this gap. Humans need physical contact with each other. Technology should allow for a fullfilling Human-Human Interaction.
An infant may sink into depression and die without the closeness of her mothers body (studies refer of increased sudden infant death syndrome if children are not being hugged during the first 40 days of life). Adults, especially elderly people living far away from their families, deprived of tactile contact for a long period of time will tell you just how depressing it feels. A hug, a handshake, a pat on the back, and a kiss are all very important and bring us close to others, reconnect us to our memories and accentuates our present perceptions. There is an increasing need of human contact, not only for fun and pleasure, but also for improving healthcare and solve learning disabilities.
Process
We involved the final users in participatory design sessions from the early stage of the design process. This technique allows for faster refining of concepts and prototypes and gives the possibility to bring desirable products to market in a shorter time and with better results. During the testing users reported that when hugging they felt positive energy, love and happyness, safety, pleasure and stress relief. Users reported the happyness of being accepted and desired by others that is central to most of human activities.
A taxonomy of hugs developed during the research shows that hugs come from people that take care of us: mothers, sisters, fathers, grandparents, friends. A hug makes us perceive the tangible presence of the other person, the closeness contributes a sensation of warmth and relaxed harmony. During the hug positive natural chemicals get released within our body, our blood pressure regularizes, and stress soothes. Rhythmic hugs to let a child fall asleep produce soft vibrations that resonate and calm.
Additional bodystorming sessions were done at every stage of the design process. Users tried various kinds of textiles and materials such as sponges, balloons and the likes, wearing them on their body, inside their clothes or outside existing ones. During special hugging sessions we mapped the position of participants hands on the others body. Major intensity points were identified on upper arms, on the upper back part of the torso, around the waistline, neck, shoulders, and hips. In these strategic spots we placed our soft technological sandwiches containing the hugging output actuators.
Keywords
Wearable computing, telecommunication technology, fashion design, human-human interaction, design and emotion
Applications
TelecommunicationFashion designDomoticsHealthcare
