ThermoWear

What it does

ThermoWear is a high-accessible fabrication approach for customizing body-fitting smart orthoses. Integrating electronics and metamaterial structures with thermoplastic materials, ThermoWear allows to shape on bodies and adapt to body shape changing.

Your inspiration

Orthoses, providing physical protection during rehabilitation, require doctors' regular reviews and adjustments due to dynamic body shapes and medical requirements, such as swelling and scoliosis angle changes. The long-term use of unsuitable orthoses often triggers side effects (e.g., skin abrasion and pressure sores). Also, the risk of contagion and the heavy burden on the medical system made it difficult for patients to timely access healthcare recourses, especially during COVID-19. Smart orthoses have been developed to solve this problem, but the high cost and the difficulty of adjusting limit the popularity of smart orthoses.

How it works

With sensors-embedded biocompatible thermoplastic material, ThermoWear enables direct shape reconfiguring on human bodies, quickly forming into three-dimensional smart wearables. Metamaterial structure patterns further improve fitness to organic body shapes, and enable multiple iterations of wearable shapes and sensor positions. ThermoWear empowers orthoses with various functions, such as assisting diagnosis, orthoses conditions monitoring, and game-based rehabilitation training. For dynamic finger extension splint, the orthosis provides a reaction force when users bend fingers, thus avoiding joint stiffness and muscle atrophy. For the smart mask, it might light up if the facial muscle significantly moves. The pressure-sensing scoliosis orthosis can monitor the wearing time and degree of fitness to track curative effect, and can be reshaped to adapt to the growth and varied rehabilitation demands.

Design process

The research and development of ThermoWear consist of expert interviews (e.g., clinicians, orthotics, engineers), human-centered design, electronic engineering, and structural tests. With formative study and field observation, we identified current pain points of such product: dynamic body conforming, accurate monitoring, efficient fabrication, and low learning cost for clinicians. These drove the ideation of a low-cost, efficient approach for tailoring body-fitting and adjustable smart orthoses. We prefabricated a flat sheet and formed 3D to improve manufacturing efficiency. To prevent breakage of circuits during reshaping and enable sensor adjustment for accuracy, we explored parametric metamaterial structure patterns based on the experiments of ductility, internal displacement adjustment and elasticity enhancement. Then we developed algorithms to flatten 3D shapes to 2D outlines, calculate local stretch ratio from the target 3D shapes, and generated parameterize structures. We developed various applications through design iterations and hardware robustness tests. We took a prefabricated 2D circuit board to the rehabilitation studio and the orthotist was able to shape a smart orthosis quickly and successfully with little learning cost.

How it is different

ThermoWear improves the efficiency of smart orthosis customization.ThermoWear adapts to bodies precisely and allows hand-on adjustment through reheating, while clinicians can use their existing tools with little learning and time cost to complete the fabrication of smart orthosis. Additionally, it prevents removing or re-installing electronic components during the adjustment of orthoses through integrating adaptive material and adjustable metamaterial structure. It prolongs the life cycle of smart orthoses, avoids digital remodeling and frequent replacement, and significantly reduces time and materials. In conclusion, ThermoWear makes smart orthosis more accessible, durable and adaptive.

Future plans

We will make ThermoWear into a commercial product. We are currently cooperating with clinicians and orthotists at hospitals and studios in China while optimizing performance and improving the form factor of ThermoWear. We will amplify the expertise of clinicians and orthotists with a prescriptive library of smart orthoses based on diagnoses, thus a design can be reused across many clients. Beyond medical applications, the technology of body-fitting metamaterial fabrication also can be used for a variety of critical fields, from e-jewelry and fashion to human-robot integration.

Awards

Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2022