Topic outline

  • General

    Welcome to the Smart Wearables course! 

    This is a new course developed by researchers from ELEC and ARTS together. It teaches basic knowledge and skills required for developing smart wearables, especially e-textile-based smart garment for sensing or energy harvesting. We welcome students with different technical backgrounds to join the course and to learn together. 

    The course will be taught in English. If needed, our course assistants can provide guidance in Finnish as well. 

    Starting from 04.09.2023, there will be two contact sessions per week (Mondays and Fridays 14.15-16.00 in TUAS building). Depending on the schedule, the contact sessions may be implemented as lectures, tutorials, guided exercise sessions or Q&A sessions. Besides theories, you will gain hands-on experience of basic electronic design, textile fabrication, Arduino programming, and machine learning using tools like Scikit-learn. In practice, you can learn to create your own sensing gloves for gesture recognition, or basic wearable energy harvesters during the course. 

    It is not required to have prior knowledge or experience about electronic design, textile design, embedded programming or machine learning. The course is designed for beginners in these fields. But if you have already gained basic knowledge in any of these fields (e.g., if you have already taken machine learning courses, or have taken courses on textile designs), we will suggest optional tasks for you to further advance your knowledge and skills. 

    The course will run through Period I and II. It consists of two main modules, including basics of e-textiles (Period I) and basics of machine learning (Period II). You can get 6 credits if you successfully complete both modules. It is also allowed to complete only one of these modules to get 3 credits. If you become interested in certain topics related to smart wearables and would like to learn more (e.g., wearable haptics, woven e-textiles, deep learning for wearable sensing), you are welcomed to also take the project course on Smart Wearables in Spring 2024. More information about the Spring course will be published later this year. 

    If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact the responsible teacher by email yu.xiao(at)aalto.fi.

    Teaching staff (ELEC):  Yu Xiao, Ramyah Gowrishankar, Clayton Leite, Tim Moesgen, Esa Vikberg

    Teaching staff (ARTS):  Emmi Pouta, Sofia Guridi