Recent advances in fabric-based sensors have made it possible to densely instrument textile surfaces on smart toys without changing their look and feel. While such surfaces can be instrumented with traditional sensors, rigid elements change the nature of interaction and diminish the appeal of plush toys.

Clinical-grade wearable sleep monitoring is a challenging problem since it requires concurrently monitoring brain activity, eye movement, muscle activity, cardio-respiratory features, and gross body movements. This requires multiple sensors to be worn at different locations as well as uncomfortable adhesives and discrete electronic components to be placed on the head. As a result, existing wearables either compromise comfort or compromise accuracy in tracking sleep variables. We propose PhyMask, an all-textile sleep monitoring solution that is practical and comfortable for continuous use and that acquires all signals of interest to sleep solely using comfortable textile sensors placed on the head. We show that PhyMask can be used to accurately measure all the signals required for precise sleep stage tracking and to extract advanced sleep markers such as spindles and K-complexes robustly in the real-world setting. We validate PhyMask against polysomnography (PSG) and show that it significantly outperforms two commercially-available sleep tracking wearables—Fitbit and Oura Ring.

Smart apparel with embedded sensors have the potential to revolutionize human behavior sensing by leveraging everyday clothing as the sensing substrate. However, existing textile-based sensing techniques rely on tight-fitting garments to obtain sufficient signal to noise, making it uncomfortable to wear and limiting the technology to niche applications like athletic performance monitoring.