Make: Wearable Electronics

Chapter 9. Wireless

So far, you’ve used a variety of materials, tools, and components to create interactive systems that reside on the body. But what if you want to design wearable systems that communicate beyond the body?

What if you want to use gestures, biometric data, or body language to control what happens on a screen? Or log body-generated data to a shared database? Or send a signal from one wearable to another?

While communication between interactive systems can easily be accomplished with wires, this is not terribly practical in the wearable context. Wires physically tether the wearable to whatever external system it is communicating with. Who wants to get tangled up in wires when they’re going for a run, bustin’ a move, or just walking ...