Prediction of the Clothing Pressure Using the Radii of Double Curvature and Transformation of a Fabric

Clothing pressure has close relation with clothing comfort and depends on the pattern and properties of textile fabrics. Choosing a suitable clothing pressure is an essential factor for designing functional clothing such as the foundation for reshaping of a body contour or medical items for bum patient, and etc. However, it is hard to measure pressure values at the curved surface of a human body correctly. Recently, an air pack type pressure sensor, which has relatively excellent performance has been used to measure clothing pressure, however, it is still inconvenient to apply because it is a contact- type sensor. Therefore, in this paper, we suggest an indirect method that can measure clothing pressure without touching the subject by improving the equation of Kirk and Ibrahim (1966). However, confusions have been occurred when someone use the equation since the definition of parameters are somewhat vague. Furthermore, the estimated clothing pressure obtained by the previous method are quite different from the real values because this method does not consider the 3D effect of a human body and property changes of a transformed fabric. In this paper, the direction of principal stress and the radius of curvature in the principal direction were searched in the 3D image of the deformed girdle to get more accurate clothing pressure. The estimated clothing pressure was verified by comparing the result of the air pack type pressure sensor. It was found that the accuracy of the pressure estimation was improved by considering the 3D curvature of human body and the directional characteristics of textile fabrics.