Breathing Garment: A respiratory regulation garment for voice pedagogy

By Ozgun Kilic Afsar, Kelsey Cotton, Yoav Luft, Fehmi Ben Abdesslem, Kristina Hook, and Hiroshi Ishii.

In the fabrication process of the garment, we worked closely with a classically trained opera singer. Our aim was to capture the somatic expertise in a tangible form. We had the singer perform while wearing the garment made of our robotic fibers, and recorded the movement data from the strain sensors woven into the garment. Then, we translated the sensor data to the corresponding haptic feedback; whether it's in the form of soft vibration, compression or lateral skin stretch. 

We were eventually able to achieve both the sensing and the modes of actuation that we wanted in the textile interface, to record and replay the complex movements that we could capture from an expert singer's physiology and transpose it to a non-singer, novice learner's body.

So, we are not just capturing the kinetic know-how from an expert, but we are able to kinesthetically transfer that to someone who is just learning.

The physiology of breathing is actually quite complex. We are not quite aware of which muscles we use and what the physiology of breathing consists of. So, this early prototype of our garment is designed to have separate modules to monitor different respiratory muscle groups as the wearer inspires and expires, and can replay the individual motions to stimulate the activation of each muscle group.

Eventually, our hope is that such garments could also be used to help patients regain healthy breathing patterns after major surgery or a respiratory disease such as Covid-19, or even as an alternative treatment for respiratory dysregulation such as sleep apnea.