Engineering knitted wearables

We treat the knit as a designable mechanical medium. Haptiknit is a soft, one-piece knitted sleeve that renders rich, spatially resolved touch on the forearm: grading local stiffness through stitch architecture and a heat-fusible yarn lets embedded pneumatic actuators push their force into the skin rather than into the fabric. In human studies it localized touch, produced smooth apparent motion, and conveyed affective gestures as reliably as bulkier voice-coil arrays, far more comfortably. We also built a multi-level modeling framework that predicts heterogeneous knit mechanics in minutes and used it to design a graded compression sleeve, so the garment itself becomes the mechanism.