Smart Textiles for Designing Soft Robots and Measuring Social Signals

Abstract

Textile surfaces are ubiquitous in our everyday life. In the form of clothing, they follow our movement unintrusively, and are comfortable to wear. As such, textiles present a suitable material to exploit for soft robotic devices and wearable interfaces in human centred computing. In this talk I will give an overview of my work in these domains and present examples of how textiles can benefit developments in healthcare, studying social behaviour, as well as performance art.

Bio

Sophie Skach is a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the Centre for Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary University of London. With a background in fashion design, her research incorporates textile technology applied to a variety of fields, including soft robotics, social interaction, and wearable sensing. As an interdisciplinary researcher and designer, she recently also collaborated with digital music researchers in Iceland and Germany on creating flexible interfaces for sound interaction.