Smart Apparel E-Skin Tracks Your Motion Without Cameras
As the 2020 Summer Olympics are approaching, smart apparel companies are benefiting from this attention. The latest, e-skin by Xenoma, is capable of accurately tracking and analyzing user’s movements. We talked to the CEO and co-founder, Dr. Ichiro Amimori , about how e-skin can impact the future of virtual reality (VR), healthcare sports and wellness & fitness.
What Is E-Skin
The smart apparel e-skin looks like a sophisticated T-shirt straight out of sci-fi movies like Tron. However, those glistening silver lines are not the designer’s concept but electric circuits with built-in sensors. When the user moves, the sensors detect the motion and transmit the data from the chest-mounted Hub to a PC or smartphone via Bluetooth where software analyzes what kind of motion was conducted.
“Motion tracking is difficult because it requires many sensors dotted around the body and multiple synchronized cameras to accurately detect user’s movements. But we are the one company who could incorporate multiple sensors all over a T-shirt, while still making it comfortable,” says Ichiro.
The T-shirt itself is machine-washable and extremely flexible. It can stretched up to 50% for 10,000 times. The company produces six sizes for both men and women.
Where To Use E-Skin
Initially, the T-shirt was intended to be used for sports and entertainment. For example, Xenoma demonstrated that an e-skin shirt can easily recognize and mirror different types of golf swings in realtime. The advantage for this is the ability to provide instant analysis of the user’s form in any environment, without being constrained by cameras.
Now its creators also think e-skin might be useful for preventing diseases. As a part of this plan, Ichiro and his team went to the hospitals that specialize in treating dementia patients and asked doctors if wearable wristbands generally used for tracking patients are sufficient. The answer was “no”; as patients tend to take off the wristbands easily. That’s is why e-skin could become a solution for dementia treatment, says Ichiro. The next move is to make smart pants for patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease, as doctors also need to track lower extremity movements.
How e-skin Was Made Into Reality
Xenoma’s CEO Ichiro Amimori received his Ph.D. in material science and spent 18 years working at Fujifilm. After leaving the company, he devoted himself as a freelance technologist managing projects at universities and small-sized companies. In 2015, Xenoma became a spin-off of the University of Tokyo and the first prototype was designed with a 3D printer.
Ichiro Amimori: “After I finished my last project, I thought that it would take me another 10 years to complete the another one. Then I decided to sail away from other corporations and set up my own business. Actually, startups are very easy to move on and work with.”
In August 2017, Xenoma launched its Kickstarter project and reached a goal of $50,000, one month after. The most challenging part was not the actual campaign but the preparation for it. In order to target the right customers, a lot of resources had to be invested in video promotion and social media ads.
Xenoma’s promotion video for Kickstarter campaign
After Xenoma succeeded with venture capital fundraising, the number of employees increased from 5 to 20. As of now, half of the team are engineers and one third are designers, while the rest are in charge of marketing and business administration, including sales.
The company currently manufacturers in Vietnam in order to keep costs competitive. Their partners are part of a Japanese company in Ho Chi Mihn that currently produces around 50 items per month.
It’s not the first time a Japanese company makes smart apparel for sports. In 2014, Japanese mobile carrier NTT Docomo and materials developer Toray developed an inner T-shirt that can record user’s heart rate and electrocardiogram in a variety of daily scenarios.
Surprisingly, Xenoma is more known internationally than in Japan. As a frequent participant of global trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held annually in Las Vegas, they are strongly focused on overseas marketing.
However, Ichiro is very optimistic about the Japanese smart apparel industry. His shirts are distributed to major companies including a Japan-based global electronics company, national research centers and Japanese universities including his alma mater The University of Tokyo. Once Xenoma finishes supplying e-skin shirts to their Kickstarter backers, they will start preparing to sell smart apparel directly to individual customers.
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Originally published at medium.com on November 28, 2017.
