This workshop addresses an emerging new field of research that combines the strengths and capabilities of electronics and textiles in one: namely electronic textiles, or e-textiles. E-textiles, also called Smart Fabrics, have not only “wearable” capabilities like any other garment, but also local monitoring and computation, as well as wireless communication capabilities. Sensors and simple computational elements are embedded in e-textiles, as well as built into yarns, with the goal of gathering sensitive information, monitoring vital statistics and sending them remotely (possibly over a wireless channel) for further processing. Possible applications include medical (infant or patient) monitoring, personal information processing systems, or remote monitoring of deployed personnel in military or space applications. This workshop is intended to introduce the audience to the exciting field of e-textiles, illustrate their possible applications and challenges imposed by the dual textile/electronics technology on the hardware/software system design community.

Topics of interest

Electronic textiles or e-textiles are a newly emerging interdisciplinary field of research which brings together specialists in information technology, microsystems, materials, and textiles. The focus of this new area is on developing the enabling technologies and fabrication techniques for the economical manufacture of large-area, flexible, conformable information systems which are expected to have unique applications for both consumer electronics and military industry. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• models of computation for e-textile applications
• performance, power and fault-tolerance analysis
• fault-tolerance and power management
• middleware support for on-the-fly monitoring and reconfiguration
• e-textile applications

The intended audience of the workshop includes hardware and software system developers in both industry and academia. Since this new venue of research is likely to introduce revolutionary changes in the classic design cycle of today, there will be significant long term impact on both industry as well as academic research community. Although production of e-textile-based products is limited today, it is very likely to grow sometime in the near future. The systems community has to be ready to deliver tools and techniques for analysis, modeling and on-the-fly reconfiguring such products. We believe that a workshop on this topic can potentially harvest fruitful research and significant results with major impact for the systems community. The format of the workshop will include presentations of selected papers and plenty of time for discussion.

Submission details

Submissions should be at most 6 pages in length. The papers can be submitted in either PostScript or PDF format via email only to either of the organizers . Please include the following information in plain text with the submission:

• author's name(s), address, phone and FAX numbers, and email address;
• the title and abstract of the paper.

Important dates (tentative)

• August 23 : Electronic submission due (extended deadline)
• September 6 : Author notification
• September  20 : Final version of paper due

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