I-Corps: Translation Potential of Programmable Haptic Textiles for Operational Awareness

About This Grant

This I-Corps project focuses on the development of wearable textile systems that communicate through the sense of touch to enhance awareness, safety, and performance in high-risk environments. These garment-integrated systems discreetly transmit information to the wearer using programmed physical cues such as vibration, warmth, or pressure, directly by the wearer’s clothing. This solution improves cognitive bandwidth and reduces situational blind spots to improve performance and reduce risk for personnel in military, emergency response, and/or industrial safety roles. The system is lightweight, unobtrusive, and designed to operate with or without vision or hearing, which is ideal for scenarios where conventional communication tools are overloaded or impaired. These issues affect millions of workers and represent a national concern in health, security, and operational effectiveness. By providing enhanced communication through the sense of touch, this technology enables faster decision-making, improved coordination, and reduced exposure to risk, with broad implications for public safety and national defense. This I-Corps project utilizes experiential learning coupled with a first-hand investigation of the industry ecosystem to assess the translation potential of the technology. This solution is based on the development of fully-textile haptic systems that combine fluidic circuits and electronic circuits embedded within smart fabrics to deliver programmable signals, such as compressions, vibrations, and thermal cues. The garment-integrated haptic systems contain no rigid components and apply stimuli directly to the skin in response to signals from remote command inputs. Scientific advances include embedded fluidic logic, multimodal actuation, and programmable feedback mechanisms through scalable, garment-compatible platforms. In addition to distributing haptic communication across the body in a variety of modes, these haptic textiles outperform current state-of-the-art haptic systems in terms of size, weight, power consumption, and cost, while also being durable, body-conforming, and easily integrated into standard uniforms or gear. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.