Friday, March 29, 2024

Smart Fabrics: The Comfortable Way To Wear Your Tech

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like the ones found in debit/credit cards. Wearers can pay for values up to £ 30 across 300,000 outlets in the UK, with just a wave of their hand.

Comfort in healthcare.

Without doubt, healthcare is one of the most valuable applications of smart clothing, and several products are emerging in this space, ranging from simple bedsheets that monitor health parameters of the patient, to super innovative gait trainers. Ekso Bionics has special wearable bionic suits that help in neuro-rehabilitation, for victims of stroke or spinal cord injury. The suits help patients to walk again, through gait-training exercises.

Contactless payment jacket by Barclaycard and Lyle & Scott
Fig. 4: Contactless payment jacket by Barclaycard and Lyle & Scott (Image courtesy: Barclaycard)

Combining a bit of fashion with utility, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen has developed a knitted cardigan, which has integrated stretch sensors that measure the movements of elderly persons wearing the cardigan, and communicate this data to the service provider.

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This cardigan is comfortable enough to be used as daily clothing. In fact, van Dongen specialises in such tech-powered fashion. She has also developed garments that help correct posture, as well as water-resistant jackets with flexible solar panels that help the wearers charge their devices when outdoors.

An intelligent t-shirt developed by scientists in Madrid can locate patients within a hospital using a GPS system that works in closed spaces. It also finds out whether the patient is seated, lying down, walking or running. This is very useful to monitor people with memory loss problems.

SensFloor goes one step further—the tech does not even have to be worn. The textile is embedded with sensors that measure capacitance, and is designed as an underlay for carpets. Basically, by measuring capacitance, sensors can detect when someone walks, sits or lies on the carpet. Radio modules help the sensors transfer collected data to a control module, which analyses the activity.

SensFloor can be assembled at healthcare centres or at assisted accommodations. It lets patients carry out simple activities by themselves, without being bound to their beds. At the same time, it helps to keep the caregivers aware of the patients’ movements. The system can be adapted to act when certain conditions are observed. For example, it can alert the patient with lights or beeps when there is the risk of collision with walls or furniture, or when he or she is too close to the staircase. It can also be made to alert caregivers. The smartcarpet underlay can also be used for other purposes like home care and energy conservation.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to smart fabrics for healthcare.

A dash of fun with smart fabrics

Applications of smart fabrics are not all serious. There is a major fun element to it, too. Wearable Experiments (We:eX), for example, have developed a product called Alert Shirt for Australian television group Foxtel, to give viewers of a football game the physical sensation of being part of the game. They can choose a player, whose movements they wish to experience. The football players wear a smartjersey, which is equipped with sensors that capture various physical aspects such as heartbeat, impact with the ball, collision with other players, falls and so on. Sensor data is sent to the base station and broadcast along with the video footage.

Viewers, in turn, wear jerseys that have several tiny motors to replicate the physical sensations felt by the players. The jerseys are connected via Bluetooth to Alert Shirt app on their mobile phone. When viewers watch the game on TV, the jersey, helped by the app, makes them experience the same physical sensations impacting the selected players. It is basically haptic feedback on a larger scale.

Several years ago Philips demonstrated its Emotions Jacket, an experimental product that creates an immersive cinema experience. It allowed users to experience the intense emotions felt by on-screen characters. The jacket could simulate the sense of touch to create certain moods. This prototype can, if you think about it, be applied to other purposes, too. For example, you can sense when a baby is restless and then simulate the right emotions to help it settle down. You can also use a sense of touch to comfort and de-stress patients.

CuteCircuit has devised some such beautiful garments. One of the founders’ first prototypes was Hug Shirt, which lets you send hugs over a distance. The sender’s shirt has sensors that measure the strength, duration, location of touch, skin’s warmth and heartbeat rate of the sender. The receiver’s shirt has actuators that recreate the same hug, although they are a good distance apart. Of course, the shirt pairs with a mobile phone.
Recently, CuteCircuit developed a variant of this shirt, called Sound Shirt, which helps hearing impaired people experience music. Sound Shirt is packed with tiny actuators. It connects to a computer system, which picks up audio from microphones placed at various points on the stage,

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