Designing Intimate Wearables to Promote Preventative Health Care Practices Abstract In this paper we explore the design of intimate wearables as a new research direction to promote preventative care practices. We describe Intimates, a speculative wearable e-textile intended to support breast self-awareness. With Intimates, we propose that everyday lifestyle items, such as clothing, can contribute to promote wellness and education about hidden and taboo parts of the body. We suggest that by combining novel interactions and technologies within intimate apparel, these wearables can offer casual and relaxed interfaces to enable self-care. Author Keywords Wearable; e-textile; intimate care; breast self- awareness; preventative health practices. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. Introduction Intimates is a piece of intimate apparel that explores the potential for wearable technology to support self- learning about our personal bodies. Performing a monthly breast self-exam is a practice commonly encouraged among women and, for many decades, it has been considered a ritual of intimate care that helps in early detection of breast cancer. However, research Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. UbiComp/ISWC'15 Adjunct, September 7-11, 2015, Osaka, Japan. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3575-1/15/09…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2800835.2809440 Teresa Almeida Open Lab School of Computing Science Newcastle University [email protected]659 UBICOMP/ISWC '15 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 7–11, 2015, OSAKA, JAPAN
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Designing Intimate Wearables to Promote Preventative Health Care Practices
Abstract In this paper we explore the design of intimate wearables as a new research direction to promote preventative care practices. We describe Intimates, a speculative wearable e-textile intended to support breast self-awareness. With Intimates, we propose that everyday lifestyle items, such as clothing, can contribute to promote wellness and education about hidden and taboo parts of the body. We suggest that by combining novel interactions and technologies within intimate apparel, these wearables can offer casual and relaxed interfaces to enable self-care.
Author Keywords Wearable; e-textile; intimate care; breast self-awareness; preventative health practices.
ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.
Introduction Intimates is a piece of intimate apparel that explores the potential for wearable technology to support self-learning about our personal bodies. Performing a monthly breast self-exam is a practice commonly encouraged among women and, for many decades, it has been considered a ritual of intimate care that helps in early detection of breast cancer. However, research
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. UbiComp/ISWC'15 Adjunct, September 7-11, 2015, Osaka, Japan. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3575-1/15/09…$15.00. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2800835.2809440
Teresa Almeida Open Lab School of Computing Science Newcastle University [email protected]
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UBICOMP/ISWC '15 ADJUNCT, SEPTEMBER 7–11, 2015, OSAKA, JAPAN
shows that breast self-examination can cause distress, i.e. anxiety or lead to unnecessary procedures, and may not have any advantages to detection or reduce breast cancer deaths [5]. In light of such studies, there has been a shift toward ‘breast self-awareness’ which suggests that, instead of a methodical step-by-step self-exam, women check their breasts as they go about their everyday routines, such as showering or dressing. In our work, we explore fashionable intimate wearables to evoke perceptions of a self-exam and sensitize toward self-checks as an approach to self-empowerment (women are informed of its benefits and limitations and can choose to do it or not) and as a method to become more engaged in preventative health.
Related Work Smart textiles have the potential to support personal health and wellbeing deeply [6], and a wide variety of on-body technologies already support wellness education about the body. More relevant to our work are medical wearables such as [4], a proposal that combines biotechnology with intimate apparel for localized drug delivery for women prone to developing breast cancer, and ‘body-worn’ mastectomy tattoos [1] that conceal scarring of the breast after surgery. Both examples explore contact on and with the skin to support personal wellbeing. Furthermore, wearables for preventative care have already explored intimate wearables for promoting health awareness, for example, works such as the tweeting bra [8], which uses social media as a reminder to self-exam, and the iTBra [9], which integrates smart textiles for diagnosis. Furthermore, the Malignant Mole Bikini alerts the wearer to be vigilant about the odds of skin cancer [7].
Figure 1: Intimates for breast self-awareness (early explorations)
Design innovations made possible in clothing draw attention to such present-day concerns and thought provoking technology can contribute to help break barriers of body taboo associated with them, e.g. breasts.
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Earlier Explorations Our previous work includes [2], a design kit for learning about female pelvic fitness, and [3], an augmented system that employs non-traditional on-body interactions and explores the potential of using a mobile device as an interface to discover and learn about hidden parts of the body. The pelvic floor design kit integrates e-textiles as the core material to teach and learn about intimate parts of the self and to support body literacy; and [3] blends wearable and mobile technologies with modern lifestyle by combining a pair of underwear for embodied playful interaction, and a mobile phone as a tool for embodied discovery.
Intimate Wearables: Breast Self-Awareness Intimates is a wearable e-textile designed for promoting breast-awareness. It is a piece of intimate apparel, a bra vest top (figure 1), which explores wearable technology and smart materials to promote female intimate care and wellness education. The surface textile design is inspired by simplicity and minimalism in fashion, and changing colour enabled floral patterns are inspired by breast lobes, which are arranged like the petals of a daisy. The interaction is intimate as much as the dynamic patterns are subtle, and invites the wearer to use ‘touch’ and apply pressure in designated areas of the vest, making the floral designs visible. These patterns become more discernible as the ‘self-exam’ evolves: while Intimates does not intend to provide step-by-step guidance to a breast self-exam it aims to investigate how on-body technology can add to (the decision of) performing wellness routines of intimate care. Intimates uses touch sensing as a human interface device. It combines textile based capacitive pressure sensors and smart materials, i.e., thermochromic ink to
Figure 2: Thermochromic print, detail of heating design (early explorations)
reveal changing patterns based on situated on-body interactions (figure 2). The touch sensing areas derive from the technique to perform a breast self-exam of using a pattern of up- and-down lines or strips. By replicating this movement, the colour of the fabric changes and creates a pattern. Dynamic textile patterns empower the wearer to affect the design ‘effect’, all the while supporting playful embodied
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interactions, and eventually making the wearer more engaged in her preventative health.
Conclusion In this work, we introduced Intimates, a speculative design to promote breast self-awareness. This is a fashion experiment derived from our research in intimate care and wearables for self-awareness of intimate bodily parts and wellness routines, i.e. pelvic fitness. Similarly to that ongoing body of research, Intimates supports playful embodied interactions to promote learning and awareness of body parts that are mostly considered a topic of taboo, but nevertheless require a lifetime of care. While doing this, we aim to generate the debate about such bodily topics that are underexplored in UbiComp and wearable technology, and contribute to the discourse around fashionable and intimate wearables to encourage healthier lifestyles.
References
1. Allen, D. Mastectomy Tatoos. http://www.allentattoo.com/mastectomy.
2. Almeida, T., Comber, R., Olivier, P., and Balaam, M. Intimate Care : Exploring eTextiles for Teaching Female Pelvic Fitness. DIS Companion ’14, (2014), 5–8.
3. Almeida, T., Wood, G., Saraf, D., and Balaam, M. Labella. Interactions Gallery. British HCI, (2015).
4. Da Costa, S. Foxleaf Bra. 2015. http://www.materialfutures.com/graduates/2014-2/sarah-da-costa/.
5. Mark, K., Temkin, S.M., and Terplan, M. Breast Self-Awareness: The Evidence Behind the Euphemism. Obstetrics & Ginecology 123, 4 (2014), 731–3.
6. O’Mahony, M. Advanced Textiles for Health and Wellbeing. Thames& Hudson, 2011.
7. Seymour, S. Fashionable Technology: the Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology. SpringerWienNewYork, Wien, 2009.
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