Getting dressed is the sort of task nobody thinks about until they can no longer manage it. For millions of older and disabled people, pulling on a sleeve is a daily negotiation with buttons, shoulders, and gravity, and it usually needs a second pair of hands.
A research team from South Korea and the United States would rather the garment did the reaching.
Scientists from KAIST in Daejeon and Stanford University have unveiled a wearable system that climbs onto its owner, with none of the robot carers or wearable exoskeletons that tend to headline the assistive-tech beat, as first reported by Reuters.
They call it SWAG, for Self-Wearing Adaptive Garments, and the acronym is only half a joke. Instead of a rigid arm that grips a jacket and wrestles it over a body, the clothing deploys itself.
The trick is borrowed from vine robots, the soft growing machines developed in Allison Okamura’s lab at Stanford. Those devices creep forward by everting from their tip, the way a party horn unrolls, and have been used to snake through rubble and inside the body.
