Life & Style | Gadgets & Tech
Intelligent clothes
An i-wear that provides useful information to the wearer is now becoming part of fashion. Smart clothing or intelligent clothing is the marriage of electronics with textiles.
- By Inam Abidi Amrohvi, Notes Report
- Published: 00:04 October 7, 2007
- The trends in smart clothing development suggest that technology will gradually become an integral part of fashion.
- Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/Gulf News
I'm sure most of you must have seen the Bond movies. Isn't it fun to watch those awesome gadgets in action. In fact, some of them were, and still are, developed exclusively for the series.
But this new research will put all that to shame. Smart clothing or intelligent clothing is actually the marriage of electronics with textiles. Work in this area has been going on for awhile, and many prototypes have been developed in the process.
The concept
The concept behind the technology is not new. The first conference on smart clothing technology was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 1997. Since then, the scientists and retailers have been exploring a range of possibilities.
Technically speaking smart clothing or i-wear incorporates an array of conducting strands interwoven with textile yarn, which enables it to become sensory and provide useful information to the wearer. On the face of it, the clothing may not look drastically different from any other.
From the electronics industry's standpoint, a smart garment is an ideal interface medium between humans and electronic products due to its mobility, natural interaction and advanced technologies in microelectronics and the smart textile fields. The fashion industry views it as a good opportunity to incorporate new technologies, which helps it evolve. It is generally held that smart clothes must include intelligent functions and fashionable design.
Some implementations
Let's look at some of the i-wear available or under development:
Transparent coat: This will remind you of that famous novel by H.G. Wells, "The Invisible Man." The transparent coat is covered with tiny pieces of glass that effectively become a screen.
A video camera is then used to record the scenery behind the wearer and the results are projected onto the clothes. It gives the effect of the wearer appearing transparent. One of the fields in which this can be used is surgery, allowing a surgeon to effectively see through his hands.
Smart suit: The suit, designed at Finland's Tampere University of Technology, consists of two-piece underwear, supporting vest and actual snowmobile jacket and trousers. It can give information about the wearer's health, location and movements with the help of several integrated sensors. If the wearer has an accident or is in any abnormal situation, the suit will send a message to an emergency office. The message contains the current coordinates of the user's position and data from physiological measurements. A Global Positioning System (GPS) is employed to acquire the current coordinates.
Heated vest: The heated vest, designed by the Personal Electronics Group, includes heated clothing, a measurement unit, a power control unit and power source. The heated clothing is based on a vest with long sleeves, which contains digital temperature sensors and electrically heated carbon fabric panels.
The temperature sensors measure the skin temperature of the wearer. The power control unit uses these measurements to control the heating power of the heating panels. The UI is implemented on a handheld, Via the UI, the user can regulate the heating.
The best part is that the vest along with the sensors is machine washable. The printed circuit boards and the heating panels have to be detached before washing.
Health-monitoring shirt: The LifeShirt system developed by VivoMetrics is a typical lifesaver as it collects pulmonary, cardiac and other physiological data and co-relates these over a period of time.
The system gathers data during the subject's daily routines, providing pharmaceuticals and academic researchers a continuous movie of the subject's health in real-life situations (i.e., at college, while exercising, etc). It acts as a health monitor, communication system, just-in-time information system and an application that controls real-world applications.
No-contact jacket: This would be music to all the females out there. The no-contact jacket' is a wearable defensive jacket created to aid women in case of an assault. When activated by the wearer, 80,000 volts of low amperage electric current flows just below the surface shell of the jacket. This electric armour thus shields the wearer from any unauthorised body contact.
The future
The trends in smart clothing development suggest that technology will gradually become an integral part of fashion.
The research is on to develop a 3D measuring system that can help one check the fit of a garment. Consumers can then view a selection of clothes on the internet and see how these look on their bodies by 'trying them on' in a virtual environment.
The writer is a guru of tech who runs a trading company in Dubai
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