UBICOMP'25 - Intelligent Soft Wearables

UbiComp Workshop, 10/13/2025, Espoo, Finland

Human bodies are almost always in contact with soft materials like clothing, for warmth, protection, self-expression, etc. Recent advancements in intelligent soft wearables have augmented these on-body soft objects with computational functions and intelligence with little compromise on the softness and comforts of wearables, allowing prolonged wear. These innovations, which combine advanced soft sensor design, fabrication, and computational power, offer unprecedented opportunities to improve our health, productivity, and overall well-being with monitoring and assistive capabilities. However, the inherent physical properties of soft materials present unique challenges in achieving practical interactions. The complexity of intelligent soft wearables, multiplexing intricate designs, soft materials, flexible electronics, advanced signal processing algorithms, and machine learning models, necessitates collaborative efforts from experts across diverse domains. This workshop aims to bring together interested researchers and practitioners across relevant domains to discuss the challenges and opportunities of intelligent soft wearables.

Organziers

Tianhong Catherine Yu, Cornell University, USA, Cedric Honnet, MIT Media Lab, USA, Tingyu Cheng, University of Notre Dame, USA, Ryo Takahashi, The University of Tokyo, Japan, Bo Zhou, DFKI, Germany, Cheng Zhang, Cornell University, USA, Paul Lukowicz, DFKI, Germany, Yoshihiro Kawahara, The University of Tokyo, Japan, Josiah Hester, Georgia Tech, USA, Joseph A. Paradiso, MIT Media Lab, USA, Yiyue Luo, University of Washington, USA, Irmandy Wicaksono, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Post-Workshop Documentation

• Community contact: SoftWearables(AT)mit.edu

Worshop preparation information 📢

Schedule

Keynotes Abstracts

Professor Michael Haller: It’s Just About a Smart Yarn: From Threads to “Intelligent” Interfaces

At first glance, a yarn seems ordinary — fragile, flexible, and woven into countless fabrics around us. But what if this yarn could sense pressure, temperature, or even magnetic fields? In this talk, I will show how we can transform traditional fibers into intelligent sensing threads, enabling textiles that act as interactive surfaces and wearable interfaces. By embedding sensors at the yarn level, we create fabrics that not only respond to touch but also monitor motion and physiology. This opens new opportunities for healthcare, sports, mobility, and playful design. I will share our latest prototypes, from knitted pressure sensors to magnetically responsive fibers, and discuss both the challenges and promises of merging textiles with computing. In the end, it’s not just a yarn — it’s the foundation for the next generation of interfaces.

Speaker Bio: Michael Haller is a Full Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy, where he directs the Media Interaction Lab. His research explores physical computing, next-generation interfaces, and human-computer interaction. Over the years, he has pioneered work on mixed reality, interactive surfaces, and smart textiles. He received his Dipl.-Ing., Dr. techn., and Habilitation degrees from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, and held research positions at HITLab New Zealand, USC in Los Angeles, and the National University of Singapore. His work has been recognized with multiple international awards, including best paper awards at ACM CHI and UIST. Today, his lab bridges theory, design, and engineering to rethink how textiles can evolve into sensing platforms for mobility and creative applications.

Professor Lucy Dunne: Building Soft “Hard”-Wear: Why Soft Stuff is Hard, and Why We Should Do It Anyway

25+ years after the “first wave” of e-textiles and clothing-based wearables, commercial products are still sparse and struggle to succeed. Wearable interfaces and devices based on hard goods have flourished in the same time frame. This talk will explore the “why” and “why bother” – what makes textile-based electronic systems so difficult, and why are on-body systems even more challenging? What stands between lab prototypes and commercial products? More importantly, what would we gain by overcoming these barriers?

Speaker Bio: Lucy E. Dunne is a professor in the Department of Design Innovation, College of Design at the University of Minnesota, where she founded and co-directs the Wearable Technology Lab. She is a co-author of “Functional Apparel Design: From Sportswear to Space Suits” (Bloomsbury, 2015). Her research is focused on wearability and garment-based wearable technology, and explores new functionality in apparel, human-device interfaces, production and manufacture, and human factors of wearable products. She has received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, a US/UK Fulbright Commission fellowship, and the NASA Silver Achievement Medal for her work with functional clothing and wearable technology.

Accepted Contributions (ACM DL)

Demo:

• Plug-n-play e-knit with LED-based sensor positioning: Yifan Li, Ryo Takahashi, Irmandy Wicaksono, Wakako Yukita, Yuhiro Iwamoto, Sunghoon Lee, Tomoyuki Yokota, Yoshihiro Kawahara
• Rethinking Wearability: When the Pillow Wears the Dreamer: Edwina Portocarrero, Zsofia Levai
• Smart Textiles, HCI and User’s Dignity: Ziqian Bai, Kai Lin, Qi Fang, Qianwen Tan, Ziyan Xia
• O₂RA HEADBAND: Zsofia Levai

Late-Breaking Work:

• Feeling the Direction: Understanding Affective Responses to Tactile Motion via a Wearable Pneumatic Interface: Liwen He, Boxue Shen, Dangxiao Wang, Yun Wang
• A Little Help from Friends: Short-Term Collaborations with AI and non-AI Agents for Exploring Digital Embroidery: Margaret Minsky
• Assessing Knit Parameters and Performance of Strain Sensors Made from Stainless Steel and Polypyrrole-based Yarns: Ramyah Gowrishankar, Ilona Mattila, Matteo Iannacchero, Fevzihan Bazarir, Jaana Vapaavuori, Yu Xiao

Cite the workshop (PDF):

Cedric Honnet, Tianhong Catherine Yu, Irmandy Wicaksono, Tingyu Cheng, Andreea Danielescu, Cheng Zhang, Stefanie Mueller, Joe Paradiso, Yiyue Luo.
"Democratizing Intelligent Soft Wearables."
In Proceedings of UIST 2024, https://doi.org/10.1145/3672539.3686707

LaTex:

@inproceedings{10.1145/3714394.3750561,
title = {Intelligent Soft Wearables},
author = {Yu, Tianhong Catherine and Honnet, Cedric and Cheng, Tingyu and Takahashi, Ryo and Zhou, Bo and Zhang, Cheng and Lukowicz, Paul and Kawahara, Yoshihiro and Hester, Josiah and Paradiso, Joseph A. and Luo, Yiyue and Wicaksono, Irmandy},
year = {2026},
isbn = {9798400714771},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3750561},
doi = {10.1145/3714394.3750561},
booktitle = {Companion of the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing},
pages = {1123–1126},
numpages = {4},
location = {Finland},
series = {UbiComp Companion '25}
}