This project focussed on the use of smart textiles for full body posture monitoring and exploring the potential of a tight fitting catsuit to measure posture close to the body. A full body monitoring system (FBMS) that is wearable and easy to use, was found to be most relevant in the domain of first line care physical therapy(PT). As the form of the product was set in the beginning of the project, the ViP analysis was used to gain insight in the Domain of physical therapy, the context the FBMS is used, the qualities of the interactions users have with the FBMS and the features of the product. A fully textile based wearable system for monitoring postures is complex but not impossible. In terms of research in the field of wearable textiles, recent developments has shown a surge in possibilities and posture sensing abilities. The identified target users are female physical therapy patients with a young family who experience lower back pain. Prevalence of lower back issues are highest among musculoskeletal conditions and issues related to lower back pain have a large influence on the rest of the body. Here the posture changes due to poor posture behaviour, creating deformities in the body. These deformities can be measured by adapting strain resistive sensors to textile based sensors and integrated them in a tight fitting bodysuit. For this purpose, the zigzag stitch, shieldex 2-ply silvercoated yarn and 85% lycra proved most successful in obtaining a useful sensor signal. Here, posture and change in posture could be measured and provide the user with direct haptic feedback on their posture with vibration motors.

The process of physical rehabilitation in most cases consists of visits to a physical therapist and exercises the patient is expected to perform at home. To increase or maintain strength or flexibility these exercises need to be performed regularly. Practice teaches us that not all patients succeed here. In this project, we look into what is keeping them from succeeding and how we can support this process. In literature, four categories of barriers are described, from which the psychological barriers are most interesting to investigate further within this project. Motivation plays a big part within this category. The Fogg model gives structure to the different components of motivation and different factors influencing the execution of preferred behavior. It shows us triggers will fail if motivation is low or the task takes too much effort to complete. In a lot of the cases, the intention to complete the exercises is present with the client, but the behavior does not reflect this intention. The intention-behavior gap can be bridged the same way the fogg model suggests triggers to be efficient, by motivating the user or making the task take less effort. By providing support during the exercise - providing both motivation and decreasing effort - and giving the patient the opportunity to track their progress after doing the exercises for a longer amount of time we can increase the exercise adherence. To provide support, we need to gather data on the movements that are made during the exercise. We developed a textile stitched strain sensor that tracks the angle of a joint. The sensor has conductive thread stitched in a tight zigzag pattern onto Kinesio tape. Since the tape is adhered to the skin, the sensor experiences minimal hysteresis. Using the data gathered by the stitched strain sensor, we tested giving back different kinds of feedback using two different actuators. We found that giving the test subjects more precise data on their movement made them more accurate, but at the same time, made them experience their movement as less accurate. This on the one hand, gave them more motivation to improve, but also made them less confident in performing the exercise. The project proves that using the real time data gathered by the stitched strain sensor can add to better executing of on exercise and has potential to with that data also contribute to long term exercise-adherence.

How do we express and experience body language, and how can we translate that into an application of Techno-Fashion that is desirable and understandable, for the wearer and his/her environment? How can this application provide an alternative for the current use of regular clothing? Through research about current expressive behaviour through clothing, it was found that there is a desire for an outfit that can dynamically change according to ones mood. Through the Vision in Product Design method, a future context has been created: In a world where technology enables clothing to be dynamically expressive, an application of Techno-Fashion makes people feel more comfortable when expressing themselves, offline, and helps with the human value in interacting. The designed garment is a dress that is able to change its aesthetics according to the expressive desire of its wearer. When the user finds herself in a social setting with a moderate expressive atmosphere, she can choose to change the expressive aesthetics of the dress to being subtle. When being in a more outgoing atmosphere, she can change the dress aesthetics to expressive. The dress makes use of fiber optic wires, LED’s and miniature motors to change the hues and silhouette of the dress. In the end the design proves to be a credible alternative for current expressive behaviour through clothing, and it provides a design that creates a deeper connection with its wearer.

This Master’s thesis report contains research about applying textile to the outer housing surface of products. The research was conducted in collaboration with Signify, a company that creates smart home luminaires for the brand Philips Hue. The goal of the project was to create design guidelines which the designers of Signify can use to create textile building blocks for their luminaires. The project explores suitable textiles, shaping possibilities and fastening methods. The most relevant insights are summarized on “Design Guidelines” pages. A “Design Decision Tree” (DDT) was created to navigate through the Design Guidelines. The DDT can be used by designers who have a housing shape in mind to learn about the relevant insights for applying textile to their specific surface. Suitable textiles for surface application are researched. It was determined that knitted and woven fabrics are suitable for surface coverage. Non-woven fabrics are not because of their undesired appearance and minimal required thickness which impedes mechanical fastening. Shaping possibilities were explored for covering surfaces with flat sheets of fabric as well as covering continuous surfaces with tubular textiles. Depending on the properties of a surface, certain fabrics and fastening methods can or cannot be used. The design limitations per surface category are summarized in the Design Guidelines. Most current textile housings are fabricated by gluing or welding the textiles to the outer surface and inner edges of the part. This method obstructs easy disassembly. An alternative method was created. This “clamping” fastening method is considered more sustainable because it allows the housing to be disassembled with ease and therefor repaired or recycled more efficiently. A clear use cue was added to the inside of the clamping mechanism to inform the user about its disassembly potential. In addition to the gluing and clamping method, creating a separate sleeve was explored. To fabricate such a sleeve, 3D-knitting can be used. Literature research was conducted to explore the possibilities of knitting three-dimensional shapes on flatbed and circular knitting machines to cover product housings. A novel product concept for Philips Hue was created. A prototype of the concept was made to demonstrate textile building blocks in the context of a luminaire. This product concept is called the “Rotation Lamp” and it is used as a tool throughout the report for experimenting and validating. The Rotation Lamp is inviting to touch because of its textile parts. It is intended to be kept close to the user and to enhance their well-being by providing them with a lamp that suits their need for ambience and functional light. Three sets of textile housings were created for the prototype to observe the different product aesthetics that these could create.

Electrochromic materials exhibit a reversible color change that is triggered by an applied voltage. Controlled color change, low voltage operation and the memory effect are three unique material properties defining electrochromic materials. As a result of an electron transfer or redox reaction, the material is able to switch between its bleached (transparent) and colored state. As this color change is a chemical reaction, it only requires an applied voltage to trigger and complete the electron transfer, thus afterwards the applied potential can be removed and the material will stay in its current state; i.e. the memory effect. Electrochromic materials are processed into a sandwich structure of thin layers that enable it to change color when a voltage is applied to it; i.e. an electrochromic device (ECD). An ECD operates through two electrodes that are connected to both the positive and negative of the voltage-source, and the two electrochromic layers. These electrochromic layers are separated by an electrolyte, that allows ion transfer, enabling change of color. Optimizing this layer structure, results into the definition of four stacking sequences, based on their vertical or co-planar stacking sequence (i.e. vertical stacking of the EC layers or merging of both EC layers in the same layer with separated electrodes) combined with the substrate used; conductive and insulating. These four stacking sequences are characterized on their transparency, shape/pattern changing abilities, coloring, design of the images displayed and interaction between the two EC layers; i.e. technical characterization. As result of this material characterization, ‘the puzzle of electrochromism’ is designed. ‘The puzzle of electrochromism is an edge-matching puzzle, with as goal to puzzle four geometric shapes by matching the sides of the adjacent puzzle pieces. Solving this puzzle communicates the goal of the demonstrator (i.e. the technical and experiential characterizations) to the puzzler, while emphasizing the simplicity and possibilities of integrating electrochromic materials in design. The ultimate goal is to inspire the puzzle to make use of electrochromic materials in their product designs, through exiting creativity and curiosity. When a puzzle piece is connected to the framework, a closed loop circuit is created between the voltage source and the coin cell battery, thus the puzzle piece will change its color. When the polarity is reversed (i.e. the puzzle piece is turned 180 degrees within the horizontal plane), it immediately switches from its primary EC layer to its secondary EC layer or vice versa. All primary EC layers will form the first puzzle to be created and all secondary EC layers the secondary puzzle. Meaning, ‘the puzzle of electrochromism’ is not just one puzzle, but includes two different puzzles. Besides the controlled color change, the other unique material properties it demonstrates are: low voltage operation, memory effect, simplicity and transparency. All individual puzzle pieces represent a different stacking sequence, through which the shape/pattern change (i.e. single and double image display), coloring (i.e. immediate and color flow), design of the images displayed (i.e. isolated and linked) and interaction between the two EC layers (i.e. overlap, connection and separation) are demonstrated. In the end, ‘the puzzle of electrochromism’ is a demonstrator making electrochromism easy understood, explainable and approachable for designers to use within their product designs; i.e. the aim of this thesis. On top of this, it is not only a good demonstrator but also a good puzzle according to the ten puzzle principles of Shell (2008).

This project is an initiative of the Department of Surgery in Maasstad Ziekenhuis. In the department, two types of patients undergo abdominal surgery: 1) mobile obese patients and, 2) patients with cancer. These types of patients need personal contact and guidance, especially patients with cancer. However, nurses are overwhelmed with work and utilize a great amount of their time to manually measure the vital signs of patients three times a day. These vital signs are heart rate, blood oxygen level, respiration rate, tympanic temperature, and blood pressure. The current method of measuring vital signs is highly inefficient and prone to error. Additionally, there is also a lack of an alarming system that can notify nurses when patients’ health condition deteriorates. Due to this, patient deterioration cannot be detected in time and complications cannot be avoided. When manual measurement of vital signs is digitalized, patients can be continuously monitored. Due to this, small changes in the patient’s health condition can be detected and nurses can intervene immediately. Current wearable devices in the market do not meet the needs and wishes of the user group. Therefore, the initial goal was to design a wearable device that is able to continuously and noninvasively measure vital signs of patients, taking into account the level of comfort for patients and level of user-friendliness for nurses. After extensive research, conceptualization, and testing, one final proposal is presented: Omnivisi Earable, a compact and lightweight wearable device that can measure all aforementioned vital signs in a continuous and non-invasive way. Due to its small form, it does not limit patients from performing their daily activities. It is also user-friendly for nurses due to the lack of wires and extra modules. This makes it easy for nurses to attach the product on the patient's body.

This is a 5-month master graduation project in collaboration with Praxa Sense to design the next generation Atrial Fibrillation diagnosis device. A long-term (more than one month) continuous, off-hospital diagnosis device is designed with the focus on user experience and diagnosis accuracy. There are several phases in this project including research and analysis, defining the scope, synthesis and design, and evaluation. Desktop research and interviews were carried out during the research phase, which helped to define the scope of this wicked problem. Then synthesis and design cover the ideation, concretization and detailed design of the final product, in which various design methods were applied. Evaluation includes different user test of the product.The result is the most compact and comfortable Atrial Fibrillation diagnosis device in the market with medical grade diagnosis.

Alkaline water electrolysis will become increasingly important for supplying the world with sufficient renewable energy, and with raw material for the chemical and pharmaceutical industry. Zero Emission Fuels B.V. (ZEF), a technology start-up based in the Netherlands, is developing a small scale alkaline electrolysis cell (AEC), which is integrated in a methanol producing micro-plant. The challenge of this project is to look into the use of polymers for the encapsulation of the ZEF AEC. The conditions of the ZEF AEC are not to be neglected. The system will run in a 30wt% KOH solution at a temperature of 90 °C and a pressure of 50 bar. Not many polymers will be able to withstand these conditions for a desired lifetime of 20 years. Using CES EduPack, a selection of 30 potentially suitable polymers has been made, from which high density polyethylene (HDPE), 40% glass-reinforced polyphenylene sulfide (PPS-40%gf) and polysulfone (PSU) are further investigated. Based on a literature review and a simple KOH ageing test, HDPE is found unsuitable for application in the ZEF AEC. PPS-40%gf and PSU have been subjected to durability testing for a range of different conditions involving a variety of KOH concentrations (15, 30 and 45wt%), and two oxygen partial pressures (O2 at 5 bar and air with pO2=20%) at different temperatures (90, 120 and 170 °C). The purpose of the ageing experiments is to give a better understanding of the effect of these parameters on the structure and integrity of the polymer; and to eventually be able to acquire a lifetime prediction. Extensive characterisation of the exposed samples has been carried out using different techniques, including weight measurement, tensile testing, DMA, creep-recovery testing, DSC, FTIR, XRD and SEM. After 12 weeks of ageing, it is found that glass-filled polymers are unsuitable for application in a strong alkaline solution at elevated temperatures, due to the dissolution of the glass fibres, which leads to a reduction in mechanical and barrier properties. However, the PPS matrix and PSU are found to be resistant to thermo-oxidative and chemical degradation in the tested ageing conditions. Only subtle changes in mechanical, visco-elastic and thermal behaviour are observed, which can be assigned to the effects of physical ageing. Due to the undesirable brittle nature of PPS, it can be concluded that PSU is the most promising candidate for the long-term application in alkaline electrolysis.

There is a raising demand for player statistics in the world of football. With the developments over the last years in wearable sensors, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) based on wearable IMU sensors can be used to tackle this problem. This thesis builds upon an earlier research done for this topic, where an end-to-end pipeline based on deep learning was created that is able to be trained and used for football activity recognition. The goal is to test and improve said pipeline. This was done by adding change of directions (COD’s) to the classifiable activities. Furthermore, run velocities were build as a spectrum with several categories depending on the speed. A combination of convolutional and recurrent layers resulted in test accuracies up to 88.9%. Afterwards, the pipeline was used to evaluate larger datasets containing football drill and a football physiotherapy training. For this a sliding window evaluation procedure was proposed. These evaluations gave promising results. Many actions and football related activities could be recognized, however many smaller, shorter actions were missed. This can be seen as lack in trainingdata. In this data, little activities with the ball were present. Hence the deep learning models could not be trained accordingly. Later, it was researched if additional training of activities with ball increased the evaluation. This was indeed confirmed, since the evaluations showed more detailed and realistic results. Including even more additional trainingdata, could result in the pipeline performing reliably in real-life football scenario’s.

Since technological devices become smaller and our devices are more fused with our bodies, the logical next step is that technology will be placeable on our skin. In this thesis the design process towards a useful application of an interface on the skin is described. To get towards this design, several methods are used in the process. To shape the design challenge, a VIP inspired method is used, which provides a clear design goal and domain. For further developing the design, a user-centered approach is used, where the use of small prototypes helps improve the design. This resulted in a tattoo-like interface on the skin, which enables the user to have more unexpected interactions with others around him. This has been designed as a counter product towards the trend of people turning towards their devices in public situations. This tattoo offers a way of increasing real social interaction, and therefore decreases the social need of interaction through our smart devices. The design can be customly build up to fit the corresponding context, which makes it applicable in many social situations where people might have the need for more social interactions.

In football, a lot of hip and thigh muscle injuries occur as a result of high muscular loads due to accelerative leg movements. To prevent muscle damage and optimise performance, it is essential to continuously identify when and how frequent local hip and thigh muscular loads develop in the explosive and dynamic football environment. The currently used method is an acceleration index based on two-dimensional position data of the whole global body measured by the Local Positioning Measurement system. The problem is that this system does not correspond with the experienced load of players because leg movements are excluded. Therefore, this study introduces a new local concept of gathering local three-dimensional leg acceleration data by inertial measurement units. This pilot study aims to use a big data analysis approach to translate leg acceleration data into a measure to indicate local muscle load and compare this new local and the current global method to the players’ experienced load. Five participants performed specific football drills with an intensity increase from jogging to sprinting and by adding a pass and shot. Measures are developed, based on the pelvis, upper leg, and lower leg accelerations, by a peak and cumulative data analysis approach. By evaluating trend percentages of the intensity increase, it is obtained that a local acceleration measure is comparable to the players’ experienced load if it considers the sum of normal or peak data points weighted per zone and per travelled distance. Furthermore, a similar result is obtained when only the upper leg or lower leg accelerations are considered. It can be concluded that local three-dimensional acceleration of the lower extremities, processed with a big data analysis approach, represent the football players’ experienced muscular load more accurate than the current global method. Further research, including a higher number of participants, should prove the significance.

Raynaud’s syndrome is a common disease which causes arteries to narrow, limiting the blood flow to the skin. An attack can cause your fingers to turn cold, white and blue and is accompanied with feelings of numbness, prickling and pain. The most common cause of a Raynaud’s attack is a cold environment. Heated gloves could therefore help Raynaud’s patients, not only by lowering the painful feelings during attacks, but by raising the ambient temperature in order to prevent them. A pair of elegant heated gloves has been designed, prototype and iterated with the input from user from the target group. By preventing Raynaud’s attacks these gloves can reduce and prevent pain, make the wearer look good and give her back the power to user her hands in any daily situation.

This report is an exploration of 3D Printed Thermal Actuators (PTAs). The goal of the project is to create a 3D printed demonstrator that shows the qualities of PTAs. PTAs are created with a Voxel8 Multi-material printer which prints both PLA and a silver paste. When electrical power is applied to the silver trace, the plastic will heat up because of Joule heating in the silver trace the plastic will react to the heat by bending. This makes it an example of 4D printing. Compared to other 4D printed samples, PTAs have the advantage that they can repeat their motion. Additionally, PTAs are able to focus their energy locally, because of the placement of the silver traces. To create a better understanding of the potential of PTAs, the Material Driven Design Method (Karana, et al., 2015) was used and set of cards with the different qualities was created. The material experience vision has been defined as; a PTA should be admired, not handled. Just like a flower that is blooming or a ladybug that walks over your hand. Multiple design ideas were generated by using the input from the set of cards with qualities, characteristics in nature and random words. With these ideas, three different concepts were created: Inchworm, Sloth and Turtle. Of these design ideas, the Inchworm and Turtle scored quite similar. However, the Turtle can also carry its own battery and therefore has the most design potential. The Turtle was chosen to be further developed into the 3D printed demonstrator. The result of this graduation project is the Turtle Tinybot. Placing the active part under an angle, combined with a rough floor and Arduino controlled power supply, proved to be the best method to create locomotion. The pattern of the shell of the Turtle Tinybot has been carefully selected because it has several functions. The final design has a shell with a voronoi pattern, two hind legs and a tail. This report is an exploration of 3D Printed Thermal Actuators (PTAs). The goal of the project is to create a 3D printed demonstrator that shows the qualities of PTAs.

For us human beings in the West, clothing has become a disposable product that provides us with protection from the environment and displays our sense of style. But, the future of clothing is about to change with the rise of smart textiles. Enso is a blouse designed for female employees that work in office environments aged 25 to 35 that are not able to relax from work. Enso provides an on-the-job recovery experience that can be accessed whenever the wearer feels like it. By using body and mind relaxation techniques a choice of electronics was made that could imitate bodily activities. These are a vibration motor that resembles a heartbeat at rest, a DC motor that mimics the movement of the body while breathing and LEDs that provide a breathing exercise for wearers to engage in.

This was an explorative project which investigated the use and implementation of smart materials in an automotive context for Toyota Motors Europe. The smart materials in this context were shape memory materials which possess the ability to change their shape under appropriate stimulus. The idea of the project was to understand how the materials behaved and to find out if this behavior could be used in some way to help the user of a Toyota autonomous car. To be able to involve the users systematically and to solve their needs, a context driven design approach called the Vision in Product Design (VIP) was adopted. Using the VIP process as a guideline and modifying it to incorporate the material technology aspect of the project, a final product concept was generated. This product not only solved the needs of the user in an autonomous car but also made efficient use of the shape memory materials. Reactive Environment Outlets (REOs) are movable outlets designed for Toyota autonomous cars which provide different environments to the user, specific to their location. REOs are actuated by shape memory muscle wires which possess the capability of contracting when heated. A simple and compact mechanism consisting of a spherical joint and muscle wires, enables the outlet to rotate in all directions. REOs would play a crucial role in future autonomous cars by providing the required environment conditions as the passenger performs different activities and takes different seating positions. The styling of the outlet was designed specifically for the Toyota Concept-i.

The goal of this report is to present and describe the effort surrounding the completion of the Master Thesis Project of classification in football. Classification is a procedure which belongs in the field of Statistics. The objective is to capture, detect and distinguish certain actions relative to the environment of analysis. In our case we are focused on classification for actions related to football, using sensor data. As a first step we introduce the motivation that enforces our project and also the nature of the sensors that provide us with the information for our analysis. We follow with some enlightening review of previous research on motion recognition related projects, in order to have some supplemental information that will provide us with experience that will serve as guidance and further direction. Afterwards we introduce the methodology of the classification. The methodology includes all the models and tools needed to achieve a precise and robust classification outcome. As a next step, we dive through the details of the experiment we are going to analyse, while we explain the process followed in order to create a refined data set that will consist the input of our models. After the description of the data and the preprocessing procedure, we present the results obtained by the analysis along with the evaluation and relative comparisons. Finally, we give the most important conclusions we reached in the whole process along with some proposals for future improvements.

been given to Human Activity Recognition (HAR) based on signals obtained by IMUs placed on different body parts. This thesis studies the usage of Deep Learning-based models to recognize different football activities in an accurate, robust, and fast manner. Several deep architectures were trained with data captured with IMU sensors placed on football players' bodies and their performances were compared. A combination of convolutional layers followed by recurrent (bidirectional) LSTM layers showed to achieve the best results with up to 96.71% of accuracy. When using normalized data via a calibration recording, these accuracies increased up to 98.2%. Results showed that deep learning models performed better in evaluation time and prediction accuracy than traditional machine learning algorithms. An end-to-end pipeline for football activity recognition was developed that can be extended to any other HAR task. With it, not only the training was explored, but also a sliding window evaluation procedure was proposed that can be used to efficiently analyze unseen IMU recordings and recognize the activities there present. This pipeline showed to be fast and robust especially with signals consistently calibrated and can be used to recognize movements on a real-time basis. It can be concluded that a combination of deep learning models and a sliding window evaluation procedure is suitable for fast and accurate HAR tasks and can be used as input for research on injury prevention. By training and evaluating the models with more data, ideally from uncontrolled experiments such as football matches, we expect to further improve the generalization property of the classifiers.

This thesis describes the process of redesigning the 3D-paintbrush. It looks into extruder screws for plastics and finds the best design variables for the 3D-paintbrush. Vortex cooling has been used to cool the extruded plastics fast and efficient. With the findings for melting and cooling the thesis looks at human-machine interaction and combines these findings into a final redesign. A mockup is made of the redesign to validate the interaction between the user and the 3D-paintbrush

The interest in shape-shifting materials has increased over the past years. A part of this field concerns the shape-shifting of sheets from flat configuration into a double curved configuration, requiring nonuniform strain among the sheet. This functionality can be used for various purposes, in different application fields. For example, shape-changing properties are increasingly used in tangible user interfaces. For activating these sheets, shape memory alloys (SMAs) lend themselves well. That is why multiple shape-shifting sheets that are activated with SMAs already exist. However, a new design is developed and explored in this thesis, in which SMA springs are used as compressive bendable actuators. This is different from the designs that are found in literature, and the distributed low bending stiffness could potentially lead to smoother shapes. The goal of the project is to create a SMA spring network that can deform out-of-plane into a specific shape and to explore possible applications. The idea is to prescribe this shape by prescribing the related nonuniform strain via controlling the springs individually. Through an iterative prototyping process such a network is developed. Flexures are included to impose the out-of-plane bending direction. Antagonist hoses are included to prevent these flexures from interacting with the springs and to draw the network back in plane upon cooling. In the final prototype, the shape of the network can be adjusted via binary activating the springs with Joule heating. More possible future applications of the network are explored through brainstorm sessions. In addition, a finite element model (FEM) is set-up to calculate the resulting shape upon an activation scheme. The important network parameters are tested and integrated in simple elements. The demonstrator can successfully deform out of plane into different shapes upon different activation schemes, although the shape control is low, and the overall shape not very smooth due to excessive local bending of the network struts. This could be diminished by increasing the bending stiffness of the struts. However, this would lead to less overall deflection as well. The control over the strains or the bending should be improved for enhanced shape control. To evaluate the FEM, the prototype is 3Dscanned and compared with the result of the FEM. There is a significant difference in the amount of deformation, which may be due to inaccuracies in the model or in the prototype. The validity of these should be improved before further evaluating the effectiveness of the simplified model.

This master thesis discusses the design of a 3D printed integrated miniature valve to control the air and flow rate in pneumatic soft robotics. The valve is able to control multiple bellows from inside the body of the soft robotic by only using one tube of air supply. The valves are actuated by Shape Memory Alloy actuator wires, named Flexinol. The valves are 3D printed together with the body of the soft robotic including the inflatable bellows. Soft robotics make use of soft en flexible materials. They are able to perform delicate tasks and adapt to their environment. Soft robotics including multiple inflatable bellows need to be connected to a pneumatic power source. When the bellows need to be controlled by the speed of inflation and deflation, a problem occurs. Current valves available on the market are not suited. They are too heavy, large or expensive. In this master theses is worked on the solution.