Tag Archives: Smart Fabric

MIT scientist weaves smart fabric with electrical signal to monitor health and store digital memory!

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MIT scientist Yoel Fink has worked on developing smart fabrics for longer than a decade. In 2010, Fink and some of his colleagues produced fibers that could detect audio. A first for smart fabric developments, the fiber could be woven into a fabric, which transformed it into a needle-thin, working microphone. Today, the team of scientists continues work on spinning fibers into the smart fabric but moves past analog capabilities towards a digital future, weaving fibers that carry continuous electrical signals into a piece of wearable smart fabric.

Published in a Nature Communications academic journal, Fink’s research suggests that the fibers carrying electrical signals could be woven into the wearable smart fabric for “applications in physiological monitoring, human-computer interfaces, and on-body machine-learning.” Incorporating those capabilities into smart fabric required first embedding hundreds of silicon digital chips into casting pre-forms before spinning that into a piece of wearable fabric.

Each string of flexible fiber reaches tens of meters in length, containing hundreds of intertwined, digital sensors that monitor temperature changes and store memory. Each digital fiber, for instance, can collect and store information on changing body temperatures, garnering real-time inference for the wearer’s activity throughout the day. In addition to tracking and collecting data on physiological measures, the smart fabric retains the information gathered and “harbors the neural pathways” necessary to understand that data and infer the future activity of the wearer.

Thin enough to slide through the eye of a needle, the smart fabric is woven with hundreds of laced digital chips that still remain undetectable to the wearer. Forming a continuous electrical connection, the textile fiber also weaves a neural network made up of 1,650 AI connections into the smart fabric, pushing the new development even further. Capable of collecting 270 minutes worth of changing body temperatures and storing a 767-kilobit full-color short film as well as a 0.48-megabyte music file, the smart fabric can retain all of this and store it for two months at a time without power.

Designer: Yoel Fink

Each string of fabric is intertwined with fibers that contain hundreds of digital chips to monitor body temperature and track memory devices.

When woven together, the fibers form a string of fabric thin enough to pass through the eye of a needle.

The fabric is thin enough that Gabriel Loke,  a Ph.D. student at MIT says, “When you put it into a shirt, you can’t feel it at all. You wouldn’t know it was there.”

Google introduce Project Jacquard for smart clothes

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Project Jacquard 2

The Google team’s latest project takes a very literal meaning on the word “wearables” – meet their latest idea, Project Jacquard.

Google have a new idea for when it comes to the very fabric of our clothes: besides picking it for its softness, texture or looks, we might also decide on some garments because they let us interact with all of our favorite gadgets. Google have this idea of producing fabric that can be used to turn on or regulate lights, control TVs or stereos, and several other possible interactions all across our houses, everything molded to whatever the users desire.

Project Jacquard exists in some sort of interconnected paradise where all kinds of gadgets interconnect with each other. This project was shown a few weeks ago at San Francisco’s very own Moscone Center, in a specially designated area for the Google I/O team. According to the reports and images brought for by the CNet team, Google are working in replacing tactile screens for fabric and thread, and using those to interact with several and diverse gadgets via the fiber networks in these.

Apparently, the concept behind this is very similar to the one behind traditional touch screens, with the big difference that fabric is malleable, hence, allowing a bigger range of possible interactions. Furthermore, these threads allow multitouch possibilities, and can be combined with gyroscopes and accelerometers for new features – will we all end with GPS’s incorporated in our clothing?

As of now, this is only a demonstration and a proof of concept – but knowing Google, they’re surely preparing something big with these ideas, which might eventually be introduced in the form of consumer products. Could it be that Google’s next big ally are fashion and sport clothes brands? We will have to wait and see what the Mountain View guys end up doing with this Project Jacquard.

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OMsignal’s Workout Clothes Share Biometric Data with Your Smartphone

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OMsignal Smart Fitness Shirt

The compression garments developed by OMsignal collect vital details about your workout and send them to your smartphone, so you can quantify yourself and your performance over various periods of time.

The term wearable tech has a more literal meaning with each passing day. Biometric sensors are moving from wristbands and smartwatches to smart clothes and socks. After all, the best way to track fitness performance is to cover as great of a body area as possible.

Stéphane Marceau, CEO and co-founder of OMsignal, explained the necessity for biometric shirts: “We’ve been wearing clothing all our lives. It’s the most natural and therefore the ultimate ‘wearable’ medium. Clothing has always been about protection and fashion, but it will now also help motivate us to better ourselves every day. You would never drive a car without a speedometer, RPM or a fuel gauge, right? Well, with OM, you now get a dashboard to better steer your life, to increase your self-mastery, to push your fitness performance, and live a healthier lifestyle.”

Marceau also explained how the technology behind biometric sensors evolved in the recent years, and how wearables based on such sensors became a reality: “Exercise physiology research has defined human performance through intricate lab studies, but the technologies researchers use were never available for everyday and the aspiring athlete. You could never bring hospital or lab-type equipment with you on the court or track. OMsignal now makes it easy to track biometrics in real time, in real life and during sports activity. At OMsignal we’ve focused on giving consumers quality insights on performance, taking the research a step further to guide users to their peak performance.”

If it wasn’t obvious enough from the previous picture, then I’ll tell you that the OMsignal smart fitness shirts come in four styles: with long or short sleeves, with no sleeves at all and… I can’t seem to be able to pin the fourth style. Anyway, there seems to be a style and size for everybody, regardless if they’re working out indoors or outdoors.

The company is already taking pre-orders, and the biometric shirts are expected to be shipped this summer. A kit comprising a t-shirt and a smart black box that sends biometric data to your smartphone can be owned for $199, but the retail price is expected to be higher.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Sensoria smart sock and the Cityzen smart shirt that acts as a fitness tracker.

Cityzen Smart Shirt Acts as a Health Tracker, Recharges by Washing

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Cityzen Smart Shirt Sensing Fabric Health Monitoring

France, the homeland of haute couture, has yet one more reason to be proud of its creative minds, who have developed a fabric embedded with health tracking sensors.

Smart clothes are definitely not something new, as we’ve seen smart socks and even mood sweaters that give an visual interpretation of your feelings. Still, Cityzen’s approach is truly innovative, as it packs sensors within the fabric. With the help of these sensors, such aspects as body heat, heart rate, motion and location can be easily monitored. Initially presented at CES, last month, the Smart Sensing fabric brought Cityzen the Inclusive Innovation in Everyday Health award, a sign that cutting edge technology gets its deserved recognition.

Since there is no way such a shirt could pack a display (regardless of how advanced it is), all the data collected by the sensors is transmitted to a smartphone via Bluetooth, as seen in the above image.

Gilbert Reveillon, Cityzen’s international managing director, pointed out that the Smart Sensing textile could have many applications: “The fabric can be made into any clothing: gloves, shirts, pants, you name it. It is the first time ever that we managed to mix these two industries, embedding sensors into textile.”

According to Reveillon, the Cityzen smart shirt could revolutionize detection of serious health problems: “You can’t prevent a heart attack from happening, but you could definitely detect it hours, or even days, ahead of it taking place.”

Moreover, the smart fabric could also be used for athletic apparel and sports clothing, as Reveillon explains “On the field, a coach could tell when a member of the team has been running over capacity and put in a fresh player.” To accomplish this, Cityzen Sciences worked together with major French sports teams, in conjunction with members of the health industry.

Reveillon also revealed that while at CES, one of his company’s employees went for an hour-long walk on the Las Vegas strip wearing a t-shirt made from the smart fabric. The vital signs were displayed all the time on a smartphone screen and “The Las Vegas street definitely increases the heartbeat. The vibes are very positive.”

While the fabric can be ironed and washed without any problems, charging it simply by washing is a work in progress, but Reveillon promised that “In two years’ time, by washing it, you will recharge the batteries.” Now that’s a feature I’d like to see in person!

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories such as this one about smart pajamas that talk children into sleeping or the smart socks that track workouts.