Zishi is a garment designed to support posture monitoring for the purposes of rehabilitation training. It has been designed with attention to presenting accurate and informative feedback to patients regarding their thoracic and shoulder posture as well as comfort, ease of use, wearability and aesthetics. Zishi can be useful during rehabilitation training for a variety of patient groups. So far, we have been concerned with two broad training scenarios a) for arm-hand (neurological) rehabilitation training after stroke or for MS and spinal cord injury patients. B) for shoulder patients. Zishi consists of a garment integrated with smart textiles and wearable electronics. It presents real-time feedback as a vibration delivered through the garment, visual and audio instructions through androidhand held device (smartphone or tablet).

Research through design allows creating a dialogue with the material. It uses making and reflection on action as a generator of knowledge. Our aim is to explore the opportunities and challenges of smart textiles. The Fablab is our set up, a place that allows us to combine the hacking- scientific-, and design community. It stimulates collaboration and the knowledge exchange needed for the development of smart textile systems. A collaborative prototyping workshop for medical products combined two worlds. The textile world in Saxion aims at incorporating conductive materials into textile structures and functional- / 3D printing to create systems for applications such as flexible heating systems and wearable technology. We combined this with the world of Industrial Design at TU/e, focused on the design of intelligent products, systems and services by the research through design approach. The collaboration between these different disciplines speeded up the process by reducing the resistance to the new and skipped the frustration on failure.

The E-Textile Swatch Exchange is a platform for sharing physical work samples in the field of electronic textiles. The exchange wishes to emphasize the importance of physicality and quality workmanship in an increasingly digital world. Individuals and collaborative efforts participate in the exchange by submitting a unique swatch design of their own, and in turn receive a compiled collection of everybody else's swatches. This means that everybody participating needs to make as many multiples of their swatch as the total number of participants. There are no guidelines defining what the swatches could or should be, only that they relate to the field of E-Textiles.

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