SeamPose: Repurposing Seams as Capacitive Sensors in a Shirt for Upper-Body Pose Tracking
This work addresses the need for discreet smart clothing for everyday motion capture, though it is incremental in leveraging existing garment features.
The researchers tackled the problem of unobtrusive upper-body pose tracking by repurposing seams in a shirt as capacitive sensors, achieving a mean per joint position error of 6.0 cm in a user study.
Seams are areas of overlapping fabric formed by stitching two or more pieces of fabric together in the cut-and-sew apparel manufacturing process. In SeamPose, we repurposed seams as capacitive sensors in a shirt for continuous upper-body pose estimation. Compared to previous all-textile motion-capturing garments that place the electrodes on the clothing surface, our solution leverages existing seams inside of a shirt by machine-sewing insulated conductive threads over the seams. The unique invisibilities and placements of the seams afford the sensing shirt to look and wear similarly as a conventional shirt while providing exciting pose-tracking capabilities. To validate this approach, we implemented a proof-of-concept untethered shirt with 8 capacitive sensing seams. With a 12-participant user study, our customized deep-learning pipeline accurately estimates the relative (to the pelvis) upper-body 3D joint positions with a mean per joint position error (MPJPE) of 6.0 cm. SeamPose represents a step towards unobtrusive integration of smart clothing for everyday pose estimation.