Sophie is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Soft Robotics at Queen Mary University of London. She conducted her PhD at the same university, as a member of the Cognitive Science Research Group. Trained as a fashion designer, her research interests are at the intersection of nonverbal social behaviour and the exploration and design of textile sensing systems on the body.

Sensors made from textiles have been well explored in different areas in Human-Computer-Interaction. Something that has been largely missing, however, is an approach that looks at their potential to capture interpersonal interaction. In her work, Sophie explores what social signals textiles can detect and develop wearable sensing systems making use of this material’s ubiquitous nature. An example Sophie will present are ‘smart’ trousers, where embedded textile pressure sensors are designed to capture lower body movement and are deployed in seated, multi-party conversations. With simple machine learning techniques, the trousers are able to detect basic conversational states, pick up posture shifts and distinguish between speakers and listeners.