IdleStripes shirt-wearable display of sedentary time

Emmi Harjuniemi, Ashley Colley, Piia Rytilahti, Hong Li, Jesse Forest, Jonna Häkkilä

PerDis’20: Proceedings of the 9TH ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays

ISWC ’18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers – October 2018

Prior work on clothing with integrated displays has typically presented catwalk-style garments, with light output from hundreds of LEDs. In contrast, we present the IdleStripes shirt, a garment for normal daily office wear, that encourages the wearer to avoid long sedentary periods through an integrated ambient display. Rather than adding the display functionality to an existing shirt, we present a process where a clothing designer designed the smart garment from scratch, in this way creating a more aesthetic and comfortable garment. A display element in the upper chest area of the shirt utilises cloth with embedded optical fibers, stripes of which illuminate based on the wearer’s inactivity. Taking a short walk then resets the display. Participants in an in-the-wild user study wore the shirt during their normal working day, and, e.g., report positively on the design of the garment and their willingness to wear it. Those that were not already frequently active during their working day, reported that the shirt encouraged them to break their sedentary behaviour and take short walks.

Harjuniemi, E., Colley, A., Rytilahti, P., & Häkkilä, J. (2020, June). IdleStripes shirt-wearable display of sedentary time. In Proceedings of the 9TH ACM International Symposium on Pervasive Displays (pp. 29-36).

Harjuniemi, E., Colley, A., Rytilahti, P., Li, H., Forest, J., & Häkkilä, J. (2018, October). Idle stripes shirt: ambient wearable display for activity tracking. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (pp. 254-259).