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University of Washington - Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
Abstract:
Humans rely on continuous physical interaction with their environment, from subtle touch and pressure to full-body movement, to carry out daily activities and maintain well-being. Building intelligent wearable assistants requires digitizing these interactions, capturing them as touch, pressure, and motion data, to enable analysis, feedback, and adaptation. Such assistants hold promise for applications in health monitoring, behavioral understanding, and interactive system design. However, realizing them is challenging: physical interactions are distributed across the body, evolve over time, differ across individuals, and demand multimodal sensing and actuation. In this talk, I will present progress toward intelligent wearable assistants for everyday physical interaction. I will introduce a series of textile-based systems, including machine-knitted tactile garments, intelligent carpets, and adaptive embroidered gloves, that demonstrate how wearables can serve as scalable, robust, and seamlessly integrated platforms for sensing, modeling, and augmenting physical interaction in daily life.
Bio:
Yiyue Luo is an Assistant Professor at University of Washington ECE, leading the Wearable Intelligence Group. She received her Ph.D. degree in EECS from MIT in 2024 and a B.S. degree in Materials Science & Engineering from UIUC in 2017. Her research lies at the intersection of digital fabrication, human-computer/robot interaction, and applied AI. Her research on integrated intelligent textiles has been published in interdisciplinary journals, e.g., Nature Electronics and Nature Communications, top human-computer interactions, robotics and learning venues, e.g., CHI, UIST, CVPR, ICRA. Her work has been selected as the cover of Nature Electronics, awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention at CHI, featured in prominent media outlets, and invited to public museums and world congress exhibitions. She has been supported by fellowship from MathWorks, Google, and Accenture, and was listed as 30 under 30 North American 2024.