Students of TU Ilmenau win competition with ’intelligent T-shirt’

Emma Stolpe presents the intelligent T-shirt at the world's leading electronics trade fair electronica - Students at Technische Universität Ilmenau have won the COSIMA competition of the Association for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies VDE at the world's leading electronics trade fair electronica in Munich with their invention of an "intelligent T-shirt". Together, the three students and one female student implemented an idea of their professor and developed a sensor system that, integrated into a T-shirt, monitors the movements of the spine. In the future, the technology could be used in medical diagnostics and protect against back injuries. "Whether standing, walking or sitting - in everyday life we tend to make incorrect movements," Michael Jung knows. In order to quickly detect and counteract bad posture, incorrect movements or simply too little movement, the Mechatronics student, together with a fellow student and two fellow students, has developed a system for monitoring the movement of the spine as part of the "Fundamentals of Biomechatronics" lecture. Two small, lightweight sensors are placed in cloth bags in the T-shirt between the shoulder blades and above the coccyx and record angular velocities and linear accelerations during movements. These values are used to calculate the inclination and rotation of the spine during walking, and the data collected by a microcontroller is transmitted wirelessly to a PC or smartphone and analyzed.