Thanks to funds from the Georgia Space Grant Consortium, 17 graduate and undergraduate students from Georgia Tech recently joined students from Virginia Tech and the University of Minnesota at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for the NASA Wearable Technology Symposium. 

Industrial design and computer science students taking Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing, a course taught by Clint Zeagler, Thad Starner and Gregory Abowd, worked together on projects under the guidance of NASA mentors. The culmination of these projects was a daylong symposium, starting in the morning with student project presentations. Students then had an opportunity to demo their work and talk with their NASA project mentors during a poster session that was open to all NASA employees for review and commentary. The day concluded with presentations from NASA engineers and specialists from the Space Center’s Advanced Suit Team, Anthropometric and Biomechanics Facility, Human Interface Branch, and Crew and Thermal Division Chief.

The NASA Wearable Technology Symposium, along with the project mentoring process that led to the project presentations at the symposium, were a wonderful way for students to work on current and relevant opportunity areas for NASA. The students were also able to meet counterparts from other institutions with similar interests in wearable technology.

"By presenting my work at the symposium and seeing the work from students at Virginia Tech and Minnesota, I figured out some new ways to prototype my glove,” said James Hallam, an Industrial Design master’s student who is working on a glove for haptic feedback. “It was a wonderful trip, and I now know where to take the completion of my project.”

 Abhishek Nandakumar, a Human Computer Interaction master's student simply said, “That was the best school trip I have ever been on, I got a lot out of it!”

Organizers Cory Simon from NASA Johnson Space Center’s Human Interface Branch and the NASA Wearable Technology Cluster – including Lucy Dunne, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Tom Martin, associate professor at Virginia Tech, and Clint Zeagler, research scientist at Georgia Tech – are hoping to hold the Symposium again next year.