The union of electronics and textiles to form electronic textiles (e-textiles) provides a promising substrate upon which motion analysis applications can be developed and implemented. Familiarity with clothing allows sensors and computational elements to be naturally integrated into garments such that wearability and usability is preserved. The dynamics of the human body and the wide variety of sensor and processing choices render the typical prototype-based design methodology prohibitively difficult and expensive. Simulation of e-textile systems not only reduces these problems but allows for thorough exploration of the design space, faster design cycles, and more robust applications. Gait analysis, the measurement of various body motion parameters during walking for medical purposes, and context awareness, the recognition of user motions, are two immediate applications that e-textiles can impact and emphasize the feasibility of e-textiles as a medium for sensor deployment on the human body. This thesis presents the design of a simulation environment for wearable e-textile systems and demonstrates the use of the simulation via a prototype pair of e-textile pants. / Master of Science

The huge advancement in the textiles industry and the accurate control on the mechanization process coupled with cost-effective manufacturing offer an innovative environment for new electronic systems, namely electronic textiles. The abundance of fabrics in our regular life offers immense possibilities for electronic integration both in wearable and large-scale applications. Augmenting this technology with a set of precepts and a simulation environment creates a new software/hardware architecture with widely useful implementations in wearable and large-area computational systems. The software environment acts as a functional modeling and testing platform, providing estimates of design metrics such as power consumption. The construction of an electronic textile (e-textile) hardware prototype, a large-scale acoustic beamformer, provides a basis for the simulator and offers experience in building these systems. The contributions of this research focus on defining the electronic textile architecture, creating a simulation environment, defining a networking scheme, and implementing hardware prototypes. / Ph. D.