Intelligent training with a fitness shirt and an e-bike

The FitnessSHIRT reads out physiological signals like pulse and breath continuously when worn. The interpreted data can be viewed on a smartphone or tablet PC, for example. Credit: © Fraunhofer IIS

Fabric manufacturers are experiencing a revolution at present: if clothing previously offered protection against the cold, rain, and snow, the trend now is toward intelligent, proactive, high-tech textiles like self-cleaning jackets, gloves that recognize toxins, and ski anoraks with integrated navigational devices to make life easier for those wearing them.

Most clever clothing is only at the prototype stage. It is by no means off-the-rack yet. Soon the FitnessSHIRT from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen, Germany, will be ready for the mass market. It continuously measures physiological signals such as breathing, pulse, and changes in heart rate -- metrics of adaptability and stress load. The intelligent sports shirt is expected to be available sometime in the next year, as an investor is already on-board.

Smart electronics are hidden in the material

Conductive textile electrodes integrated into the shirt's material capture the wearer's cardio activity. In addition, an elastic band around the upper body senses the motion of the chest during breathing. A removable electronic unit attached with snaps digitizes the raw data and calculates additional parameters like pulse rate or breath rate with the help of algorithms. The data are transmitted via radio link to a smartphone or optionally to a PC, where they are evaluated further and can be stored. These parameters form the basis for judging vital functions like stress, performance, exertion, or relaxation.

"The FitnessSHIRT can be employed a number of ways. It offers completely new options for the pursuit of sports, leisure activities, and wellness, as well as options for the medical branch," says Christian Hofmann, an engineer at IIS. For example, it could act as a training partner to provide seniors or rehabilitation patients with feedback on their vital signs during exercises or bicycling, and protect them from overexertion. Athletes will also benefit: for one thing, the SHIRT is more comfortable to wear than a chest strap. For another, the integrated sensors deliver more detailed information. Besides pulse and respiration, accelerometers sense the movement of the user and carry out an analysis. "If the pulse rate is high, for example, while the breath rate and the exercise activity is low, it could be a sign of possible heart problems," according to Hofmann.

The developers of the MENTORbike are also persuaded by the high degree of comfort when worn and the possibilities for performance diagnostics. MENTORbike is a new type of training device consisting of a pedelec, a smartphone, and an intelligent user service site on the internet. The project partners, led by BitifEye Digital Test Solutions, want to use the pedelec in combination with the FitnessSHIRT from IIS in future. The SHIRT will have a wireless connection via smartphone to the pedelec and the user service site on the internet, where the data can be viewed, analyzed, and documented. The smartphone mounted on the bicycle handlebars collects the vital parameters it receives like pulse and breath rate as well as the physical data, for instance the energy expended and the speed, analyzes them, and cuts in the electric motor as needed.

"If the pulse rate exceeds a maximum value of 150, for example, the rider is supported by the motor taking some of the load. If the pulse rate falls below a value of 80 beats per minute, the electric motor is throttled back and the pedal loading increased again. The motor output adapts automatically to the fitness of the cyclist," explains Markus Gratzfeld, an engineer with BitifEye. In this way, users are assured of an optimal level of training at all times, with neither over- nor under-exertion. Rehabilitation patients, especially persons with cardiovascular disease, could monitor their performance limits better, exercise more confidently, and increase their range of movement.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft

Seeking reality in the future of aeronautical simulation

This CFD visualization required a NASA supercomputer to handle the intensive calculations. It shows a mesh adaptation used to simulate a transport aircraft in a high-lift configuration. Credit: NASA / Elizabeth Lee-Rausch, Michael Park

The right tool for the job. It's a platitude that is as true for garage tinkerers as it is for the NASA aeronautical innovators who are helping to design future airliners that will cut fuel consumption, reduce polluting emissions and fly more quietly.

Yet at least in one area -- namely computational fluid dynamics, or CFD -- the design tools that helped give us the modern airliners flying today are not expected to be up to the challenge in the future without some serious upgrades.

This was the finding of a report recently released by NASA called "CFD Vision 2030 Study: A Path to Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences." It came out of a one-year study funded by NASA that included Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, Stanford University, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The University of Wyoming and The National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The dilemma is that today's CFD, which simulates airflow around an airplane and through its jet engines, is largely designed to deal with aircraft with traditional tube and wing configurations that everyone is used to. And even then CFD's full effectiveness through all phases of flight is limited.

But future aircraft designs routinely flying during the 2030's may look very different from today's airliners in order to deliver on the promises of reduced fuel burn, noise and emissions.

Wings may be longer and skinnier and held up, or braced, by trusses. Aircraft hulls may be broader and flatter or have more pointed noses. Jet engines may be mounted on the top of the aircraft. Or the joint between a wing and the body may be blended into a seamless contour.

Understanding the physics behind how all of these new variables will affect airflow during all phases of flight, and then finding a way to model that in a computer simulation and validate the CFD is accurate, are the challenges facing NASA's computer experts right now.

"If we can get more physics into the models we're using with our CFD, we'll have a more general tool that can attack not only off-design conditions of conventional tube and wing aircraft, but it also will do better with the different looking configurations of the future," said Mike Rogers, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

Data from wind-tunnel testing of these new aircraft designs as they come along will help refine the CFD algorithms. The overarching goal is to improve the entire suite of testing capabilities -simulation, ground and flight test -- to provide a more effective, comprehensive toolbox for designers to use to advance the state of the art more quickly.

"It's an iterative process," Rogers said. "We need to continually assess how well our tools are working so we know whether they are adequate or not."

In the meantime, even as NASA's CFD experts work down a path toward their long-range future goals of 2030 -- advancements made possible only because of vast leaps in computer processing speed and power -- their first step is to meet a set of more immediate technical challenges as soon as 2017.

The first stepping-stone goal is to reduce by 40 percent the error in computing several flow phenomena for which current models fail to make accurate predictions; these flow features are likely to be encountered on some of the new aircraft configurations now being studied.

The report highlighted the need for upgrading not only the CFD algorithms, but also discussed how those new algorithms must be written to take advantage of the ever-increasing speed and complexity of future supercomputers.

Source: nasa