Exploring Wearable E-Textile Design for Teaching Digestive System

Anatomy and Physiology to Children

Kevin JuddHuman Computer Interaction Lab

RISE Leadership AcademyA. James Clark School of Engineering

The Challenge:• Children have difficulty understanding the form and

function of their internal anatomy• BodyVis is a wearable e-textile shirt designed to

actively sense and visualize the wearer’s anatomy• A sensor system had to be developed to detect the

wearer swallowing and activate digestive simulation

The Approach:• Modularized into three parts:• Audio sensing at the neck (microphone)• Central processing and analysis• Visualization sequence

The System:• A small microphone was augmented with a

stethoscope chest piece for sensing at the neck• Data was collected by an Arduino microcontroller

and fed into MATLAB for processing.• Temporal and discrete frequency analysis

• Audio events are enumerated and classified as either swallowing or non-swallowing events.• Heuristic algorithm identified swallowing events

The Results and Future Work:• Heuristic approach was effective in most cases

but not as reliable as the application required• Very susceptible to the movement

• Recent work focused on machine learning algorithms for more reliable classification

• Processing will then be ported to Android

Microphone audio sensing apparatus Correctly classified swallowing (green) and non-swallowing (red) events