Ryo Takahashi高橋 亮
Project Assistant Professor, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo
Toward whole-body wearables that need no battery and no wire
I turn clothing itself into a wireless power and data line, so that wearable computing can cover the whole body without batteries to replace or wires to route.
About
I received my PhD in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2023, advised by Prof. Yoshihiro Kawahara. In 2022 I worked as a research scientist intern at Meta Reality Labs, advised by Prof. Hrvoje Benko and Dr. Eric Whitmire. I have received best paper awards as a first author at both ACM CHI and IEEE RA-L, as well as the ACM UbiComp Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award. I am currently a co-PI of the JST CRONOS project on full-body wireless data and power networking.
Research
I treat clothing and textiles as electromagnetic infrastructure, with the goal of removing batteries and wiring from everything we wear.
Wireless power textiles
Meander coils that are safe to the body are knitted across a whole garment, delivering watt-level power anywhere on it. Liquid-metal wiring and machine knitting make the fabric washable, cuttable and stretchable.
Battery-free wearable input
By sensing the magnetic coupling between a ring coil and a wristband coil, ultra-low-power ring input devices work without a battery or a radio on the ring.
Body-scale wireless sensing
A single machine-knitted meandered e-textile forms a near-field network that reads out battery-free sensors distributed over the entire body.
Wireless power for robots
Floors and fabrics keep delivering power to joint-repositionable snake robots and small mobile robots, enabling long-term operation without batteries.
Publications
Awards
Talks
Contact
Please reach out by email for collaborations, press enquiries, or invited talks.