WearTec

If you spend a lot of time outside during the winter months you know how hard it can be to stay warm. And don’t you say that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I live in Australia. I spent 15 years of my life waiting for the school bus in the German alpine winter, often at temperatures of minus 15 degrees Celcius or below. Unless you rug up using several layers of clothing things can get uncomfortable pretty quickly. Another downside of traditional winter clothing is that they often restrict your movement and flexibility, especially if you need to perform work or do sporting activities and that they are often too warm when going back indoors.

WarmX, a German company, may have a solution to these problems. They are selling shirts and pantyhoses that have silver fibres woven into the fabric. A small battery pack provides electricity and heats the fibres. Heat setting is adjustable. The advantage of the having the fibres directly woven into the fabric compared to traditional heating wires is less power consumption and more effective heating that works directly on the skin rather than through heat transfer from the wire.

Starting at 250 Euros for the shirt and 400 Euros for the pantyhose, the WarmX technology isn’t cheap, but then who can put a price on the comfort of being warm.

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Could we be watching television on the back of someone’s jacket soon? Well, not quite, but Philips has certainly made a step into the right direction when they introduced their Lumalive textiles.

In the first instance, Philips sees application for its Lumalive textiles in the advertising market:

Lumalive textiles make it possible to create fabrics that carry dynamic advertisements, graphics and constantly changing color surfaces. […]

Lumalive fabrics feature flexible arrays of colored light-emitting diodes (LEDs) fully integrated into the fabric - without compromising the softness or flexibility of the cloth. These light emitting textiles make it possible to create materials that can carry dynamic messages, graphics or multicolored surfaces. Fabrics like drapes, cushions or sofa coverings become active when they illuminate in order to enhance the observer’s mood and positively influence his/her behavior.

The jackets are comfortable to wear, and the Lumalive fabrics only become obvious when they light up to display vivid colored patterns, logos, short text messages or even full color animations. The electronics, batteries and LED arrays are fully integrated and invisible to the observer and wearer. The jackets feature panels of up to 200 by 200 mm², although the active sections can be scaled up to cover much larger areas such as a sofa.

And no, this is not an early research project, this is technology that is ready to go into production, according to Philips. Pretty cool, huh?

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I’m pleased to announce that the battle for the most unusual iPod accessory has reached its “climax” - quite literally actually with availability of the iBuzz. The iBuzz is vibrating attachment that can be connected to your ipod, or any other music player, and, well, vibrates to the rhythm of the music.

The iBuzz doesn’t discriminate against sex (no pun intended) either: it comes with two rubber attachments, one acting as a vibrator and the other one as a ’sleeve’ to go over youknowwhat to turn the youknowwhat into one huge (or small) organic vibrator.

And if your iPod ever lets you down, you can still use the iBuzz with its 7 predefined vibration patterns. I’d say definitely a must have item, for an affordable US$ 60. My only recommendation is not to use it on the bus or train on the way to work…

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I’ve recently posted on the AwareFashion Shirt that senses the presence of mobile phones. The same folks have developed AwareCuffs, a set of cuffs that are based on the same principle, only that they detect the presence of WLAN hotspots rather than mobile phones. A pocket that attaches to one of the cuffs holds all of the technology in place. Light emitting diodes are connected to the pocket via glass fibres and emit a light pattern on the cuff when a WLAN hotspot is in range.

I think the idea behind AwareCuffs is very interesting. Although I wouldn’t be seen wearing the cuffs, a device that would tell me whether I’m in range of a WLAN hotspot without having to boot up my laptop first would be very useful.

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I’ve reported on jackets with integrated mp3 controls previously, now the time has come to provide students with some fancy gear and bring a bit of wearable technology to their backpacks.
JanSport is offering several ‘technology enabled’ backpacks ranging from a ’simple’ wired mp3 player connection with a headset connector on the bag (so that you can listen to music without having to pull out your MP3 or CD player), to wired remote controls for your Ipod, to integrated Bluetooth technology.

The remote control buttons are integrated into the shoulder straps and allow you to access functions such as play, pause, fast forward and rewind and volume control. For the bluetooth enabled backpacks an additional call retrieve button allows you to stop the music and switch to incoming phone calls.

All I can say is, kids don’t ruin your ears and watch out for traffic before crossing the road.

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Richard Etter, a member of the AMBIENTE group at Fraunhofer IPSI, has developed Flame5, a Bluetooth enabled jacket that enables communication via heat. When someone sends you an SMS the Flame5 jacket heats up different parts of the jacket, depending on the message and provide your Bluetooth enabled phone is connected to the jacket.
The heating patterns of the jacket are configurable:
“The users define which words or sentences heat up which parts of the clothing for how long. This is important, since it enables users to define their own language or heat patterns that suit best to them. E.g. heat near the heart for a sms from your loved-one.”
The hardware and heating elements inside the jackets are located in small pockets, which can be detached before washing the garment.

I’m wondering whether there might be a market for developing pants that can pinch people in the backside when sending SMS messages. What a great way for the boss to tell employees to get off their butts - literally.

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Eleksen has recently introduced the an all fabric keyboard that is Bluetooth enabled. The keyboard has the size of a laptop keyboard and can be connected to a range of PDAs and Smartphones.

They keyboard is highly flexible, as you can see from the image, and does not contain any mechanical parts, which makes it extremely durable.

Finally a keyboard where I can wipe off my coffee spills and don’t have to get the vacuum cleaner to try and extract half a kilo a breadcrumbs

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According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the South Korean Government will support the development of wearable technology and smart clothes. Although there are no details yet on how the government plans to support or drive research in these areas, an official at the Ministry for Commerce and Industry said that research and development in these markets was too important to “be left to the market only”.
The government estimates that by 2014, the wearable market will have grown to US$ 7 billion and hopes for a market share of more than 20%.

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The RFID weblog reports that “A growing number of countries are implementing RFID chips into their passports. One of the purposes behind the RFID chips is to make passports much harder to counterfeit.” The use of RFID chips (RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and is used to remotely read information with a suitable receiver) could pose a security risk in itself however, with techno terrorists using a scanner or small handheld reader to remotely read out the sensitive information contained on the chip.
But fear not, as DIRFWear have come up with a passport case that is supposed the shield your passport and the contained RFID chip by blocking any radio frequencies that could access the RFID chip. And a wallet that can protect all your RFID tagged credit or health insurance cards is available as well.

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“Imagine being blind and trying to find your way around a city you’ve never visited before — that can be challenging for a sighted person. Georgia Tech researchers are developing a wearable computing system called the System for Wearable Audio Navigation (SWAN) designed to help the visually impaired, firefighters, soldiers and others navigate their way in unknown territory, particularly when vision is obstructed or impaired. The SWAN system, consisting of a small laptop, a proprietary tracking chip, and bone-conduction headphones, provides audio cues to guide the person from place to place, with or without vision.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology is working on the SWAN prototype which currently “consists of a small laptop computer worn in a backpack, a tracking chip, additional sensors including GPS (global positioning system), a digital compass, a head tracker, four cameras and light sensor, and special headphones called bone phones.”
The use of bone phones, which work through vibrations to the skull bone is a clever way of ensuring the ears, one of the most important senses for blind people, aren’t blocked up with headphones. “The sensors and tracking chip worn on the head send data to the SWAN applications on the laptop which computes the user’s location and in what direction he is looking, maps the travel route, then sends 3-D audio cues to the bone phones to guide the traveler along a path to the destination.”

Definitely an interesting concept, that could prove useful in a range of situations.

Link to press release.

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