Wear your true lifestyle

‘Wear your true lifestyle‘ is a ‘Wearable Senses‘ project from Gordon Tiemstra, student at the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology, with the focus on a combination of teenagers, lifestyle, identity and smart fabrics.

Gordon started out by researching the problems teenager encounter with their identity. One of the results of his research was that teenagers in the age group 12 to 16 are very intensely dealing with how to present themselves and their visual appearance.

To present themselves through visual appearance, teenager focus on their clothing but what they often forget is how they present their body via posture. Especially during puberty keeping the correct posture is sometimes difficult since teenager grow relatively fast, feeling insecure with their changing body which often leads to deformation of the spine due to wrong postures over prolonged time.

Gordon’s solution to this problem: Fabric stretch sensors integrated in clothing capable of measuring the posture. If the wearer slides into a ‘lazy’, spine deforming posture the electrically conductive fabric will stretch beyond a certain threshold, indicating a correction is needed.

Once the smart clothing detects via a LilyPad the wearer’s need for posture correction it will signal this via vibration actuators which will give a soft, gentle reminder to straighten up, invisible to others but will be felt by the wearer.

I like the concept of combining therapeutic function with fashion with the use of electrically conductive stretch fabric which seems to be able to attack one of the big problems of correct posture especially during the teen years or people spending most of the working day behind a desk.

‘Wear your true lifestyle’ is a truly sensible, smart clothing concept.

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