$ cat ~/work/emergency-sos-shirt.md
project · embedded · 2023
SOS Smart Shirt
A smart-textile SOS trigger, embroidered rather than mounted
A smart-textile safety garment: a fabric pressure sensor sends an SOS over BLE to a phone app, embroidered in conductive yarn on an Adafruit Flora.
- kind
- project
- course
- Intro to Smart Textiles, Georgia Tech
- category
- embedded
- period
- Aug 2023 - Dec 2023
- status
- completed
head -n 20 README
A smart-textiles safety garment that can be worn all day and triggered without drawing attention, with the circuitry embroidered into the cloth rather than mounted on it.
Silver-coated conductive yarn is embroidered onto cotton linen as the traces, with an Adafruit Flora and its BLE module sewn in on tabbed pads and crimp connectors bridging to the wired components. A fabric pressure sensor stitched into the chest is the SOS button; pressing it sends an event over BLE to a companion iOS app, and a vibration motor gives silent haptic confirmation to the wearer. A heart-rate sensor was the other input. I worked on the Flora firmware and the electrical side. In testing, the pressure sensor and the Bluetooth link worked end to end and the app received the trigger. The optical heart-rate reading was inconsistent through fabric, and real SMS delivery would have required a paid messaging server the team did not have.
grep -n highlights
- 01Built a wearable SOS trigger into cloth: a fabric pressure sensor and an Adafruit Flora embroidered in silver conductive yarn on cotton linen.
- 02Worked on the Flora firmware and the electrical integration, bridging sewn pads to wired components with crimp connectors.
- 03Sent the SOS over BLE to a companion iOS app, with a vibration motor for silent haptic confirmation.
- 04Tested the pressure sensor and the BLE link end to end. The heart-rate sensor was inconsistent through fabric, and SMS delivery was blocked on a paid server.