Research

Themes of Work

Our research centres around the body and how technology can be used to improve how that body exists and interacts with the surrounding environment. We focus on haptic and aural modalities, using textiles as the physical medium for building wearable computational systems. Some of the research projects we undertake focus exclusively on textile sensing and interfaces whilst other focus solely on how auditory displays can be improved for users. A growing area of our work is looking towards how these two complementary technologies can be brought together in novel applications.

Below is an non-exhaustive list of some of the research we have undertaken.

Current EU Funded Projects

SONICOM

SONICOM is a research project that aims to revolutionise the way we interact socially within augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) environments and applications, from online meetings to VR gaming.

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STELEC

STELEC, short for Sustainable Textile ELECtronics, is an interdisciplinary research project funded by the European Innovation Council (EIC) under the Pathfinder programmes in the responsible electronics topic seeking cutting-edge innovation with an end goal at TRL 2-3. The project is a multinational collaboration of research institutes, universities and companies across Europe. It aims at developing next generation textile-based electronics in applications from sensing, processing to AI, with a commitment to full lifecycle sustainability.

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Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Li:2026:10.1145/3772318.3790839,
author = {Li, Y and Wang, M and Young, IA and Stewart, R and Nissen, B},
doi = {10.1145/3772318.3790839},
title = {Holding MenstaRay: Expressing Menstrual Pain through Tactile and Knitted Soft Robotic Interactions},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790839},
year = {2026}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Menstrual pain is an embodied, unpredictable, and diverse lived experience. However, current menstrual tracking technologies mainly adopt medicalised and quantitative approaches, reducing pain to numerical data, concealing its organic and messy nature. To uncover the felt, lived experience of pain, we explored soft robotics as a tactile, dynamic medium. Through a series of material workshops, we designed MenstaRay, a novel artefact that mimics the temporality and fluctuations of menstrual pain. Findings from sensory interactions with MenstaRay show that soft robotic materials sensitise and enhance menstruators' bodily awareness, supporting them in contextually recalling, introspecting, and reflecting on their pain experiences, and encouraging a sense of self-care, self-acceptance, and companionship toward menstrual pain. We frame MenstaRay's dynamic entanglements with fluid bodily experiences as a meaningful material practice through a feminist lens, highlighting the creative potential of novel programmable interactions of knitted soft robotics to express nuanced pain characteristics, extending to other somatic experience design beyond menstruation.
AU  - Li,Y
AU  - Wang,M
AU  - Young,IA
AU  - Stewart,R
AU  - Nissen,B
DO  - 10.1145/3772318.3790839
PY  - 2026///
TI  - Holding MenstaRay: Expressing Menstrual Pain through Tactile and Knitted Soft Robotic Interactions
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790839
ER  -
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