talking 2 your Shirt is becoming soon a reality thanks to the latest wearable technology innovation from Under Armour, a company founded in 1996 by former University of Maryland football player Kevin Plank, with the dedication of creating innovative performance apparel for men, women and youth.

The E39 electric shirt with integrated sensors and attachment point for the ‘Bug’, a tiny computer that holds a triaxial accelerometer, a processor, and 2 gigabytes of storage. This super bug records heart rate, breathing rate, skin surface temperature and acceleration.

The performance data are stored on the 4.5 oz Bug but can also be wireless transmitted via Bluetooth to smart-phones, iPad and laptop, giving the trainer real-time information of the athlete’s movements and performance.

Under Armour partnered with Zephyr, a company which makes wearable biometric monitoring systems for the defense and health care industry.

It is impressive how Under Armour’s wearable technology team utilizes wearable tech possibilities to create a meaningful product, able to transform the way professional athletes can reach peak performance without being wired up like a Lab rat.

The super Bug shirt will become available to fitness enthusiasts in 2012 – so in a years time you can ask your shirt: ‘How fit I am today?’

I like to close this article with a statement, taken from the video, made by Sam Hollenbach, Innovation Engineer at UA: ‘We can measure your potential‘.

source: Wired

Illuminated, color changing cushions are not new but with the onset of long, dark hours that come at this time of the year, bringing some relaxing, soft colors into the living room has great potential to cheers people up.

To my experience any kind of light radiating object with a soft, tactile feel never misses the surprise effect for onlookers.

The Color Changing Moonlight Cushion, which retails for about $39.- might be just the right colorful dash in your home.

Besides the soft touch feel of this decorative cushion, the color changes when the cushion is stroked – a nice touch which is taking the interactivity one notch up on our interactive textile scale.

Dutch designer Dorith Sjardijn takes traditional crafts like carpet weaving and upgrades it with 21st Century technology.

The ‘8-bits kleed‘ is a beautiful example on how to do that in an esthetically pleasant way by tufting EL-wires into a Persian rug, creating cracks of light along the woven pattern.

The brilliance of such design is in it’s simplicity to make, even for DIY novices, and the strong aesthetic and emotional value this carpet upgrade creates.

A highly inspiring example on how to make use of a bit of soft electronic to bring a magical glow into the home.

Dorith Sjardijn teaches e-textiles at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and is Curator at Exhibition ‘PrettySmartTextiles‘.

The long wait is over for the Pillow remote controller. A few month ago I was lamenting suggesting why brands/retailer do not pick up one of the design inspirations that have shown up for many years, DIY enthusiasts and designer that hacked their remote controller and give it a soft touch.

Brookstone has made the thinking-out-of-the-box step into a soft electronic future with the launch of a Remote Control Pillow stuffed with a universal 6-in-1 remote control which is able to talk to over 500 devices.

Finally you can hug your remote, you can sleep on it and best of all, it will be really very hard to miss place this remote controller.

The R/C pillow has a power-saving auto shut-off feature which puts the the remote functions into deep sleep after 60 seconds of inactivity.

The remote control pillow retails for $29.95 at Brookstone.

[via: Gizmodo]

Semi professional and professional athletes need to collect their bio and other workout related data during their training to optimize their program to successfully comped for the precious metal at sporting events.

Most of the recording is still done by hand with data coming from multiple sensor devices attached to the athletes body. It’s working but cumbersome to set up the sensor devices each time before starting the training.

In our digital age where everything can be easily recorded and beamed to the ‘cloud’ for number crunching and presentation anytime and anywhere, smart workout apparel like the e-Shirt developed by Emxys at ESA’s Business Incubation Centre Noordwijk in the Netherlands, is pointing into the future of smart workout apparel for athletes.

TrainGrid consists of an e-Shirt with integrated sensors to determine in real time the athlete’s electrocardiogram, heart rate, skin temperature, body position and location via GPS. All the data are transmitted via Bluetooth to a mobile phone or computer to share with a coach, doctor, friends or on a social network.

A developer Kit is available for € 1000.- (around $ 1300.-) a steep price tag but the kit is not intended to be a commercial product but for developers to start making apps for iPhone, Facebook, Android – you name it.

Maybe smart workout clothing can motivate many to go out and move around a bit and share training routes and schedule, compare performance and the fitness status instead of sitting on the couch and share what movie you watch right now. Yeah I know, I am an optimist …

Over the past years we have seen quite some wearable technology concepts and products around babies, ranging from music radiating maternity wear for the unborn, allowing unborn babies to tweet their first movements or baby clothing that changes color when baby’s temperature rises.

The latest high-tech baby wear takes the ‘always connected’ term of your generation to a new level as mothers can check in real time on a cellphone about baby’s well-being.

Exmovere Holdings, a biomedical engineering company developed the Exmobaby sleep suit fitted with washable conductive bio-sensor textile that connects to a Zigbee wireless transceiver to send biometric data like heartbeat, emotional state and behavior to a cellphone or computer. The information will be presented in form of icons – cute and intuitive idea.

In this case I don’t see a ‘Big Brother’ like monitoring sneaking up in our society but to some degree a quite usefully wearable technology application that could give a little peace of mind especially to young and inexperienced parents or in cases where especial attention around the clock has to be given to the little one.

Exmovere is planning a first limited edition market intro of 1000 units in early 2011 for ‘selected buyers from a waiting list‘.

The Exmobaby sleep suit set will include an Exmobaby garment, a Zigbee transceiver, PC and cell phone monitoring software and six months of online service.

I like the product concept, especially the fact that this is not some demonstration kit but a product soon to be in the market, even if it is only in a very limited edition at first.

[source: medGadget via Gizmag]

A few days ago I stumbled over the job opening at Adidas for a wearable electronic designer but it seems Adidas is making already first low-tech steps towards more interactive fashion enhancements.

Glow-in-the-dark printing on fabrics is not really a high tech matter but as far as I can judge this, such fashion experiments came only into fashion – so to speak – since wearable technologies in general pushes fashion technology into new territory.

Stella McCartney used glow-in-the-dark in an aesthetic pleasant way to design a range for Adidas. The Stella McCartney collection includes Ruched-shoulder jackets, drawstring shorts and lace-up running shoes.

Colors and pattern prints are nice and have been in use for many (hundred) years in fashion design as well as beads and other eye-catching elements attached or integrated into fabrics.

But all these elements and colors are static, once you choose the print and color it stays there for ever (as long as the season lasts).

Adding (re)active materials or technologies make the emotional color and pattern play more interesting, changing it’s appearance triggered by our surrounding environment, when light or temperature or humidity changes the appearance of our clothing will change in reaction of it.

Glow-in-the-dark printing is a first step into a more (re)active future of fashion design.

[Ecouterre via StyleGuru]

Regular reader of talk2myShirt will know my special love of having Solar power in my bags.

I am fascinated from the possibility flexible, super thin solar panels which can be seamless integrated into fabrics without altering it, allowing applications conventional, glass based solar panels with a rigid metal frame do not offer.

A comprehensive overview of the power of fabrics can be found at ‘Specialty Fabrics Review‘. The article investigates the use of flexible, thin film solar panels incorporated into fabrics used for awnings and other shade structures.

Although we love sun shine, too much at certain places is also not desirable so we use sun shades on our terraces, in our gardens, in parks, on the beach and many other places.

Fitting these sun shade with solar power generating fabrics is a win-win solution. Sun shade structures are used when the sun showers us with it’s full energy and at the same time these shade spending objects don’t just reflect but harvest the energy for our use electrical power hungry gadgets.

The latest generation of solar power enhanced awning fabrics even use part of their self generated sun energy to power a sensor and motor to detect when no sun is shining to fold and unfold again when the sun is at it’s full power potential.

Unlike bags with the limited space for solar panels, awnings and other shade structures offer a large area able to generate significant amounts of electrical energy.

The article contains a list of companies that start offering sun management systems based on solar powered textiles in time for this years sunny summer season.

For me it seems like a logical and environmental conscious option to use sun power generating textile awnings or tents or sheets that can be stored and easily transported in a bag and put up at the beach or garden to get some shade and extra charge for our growing number of indispensable gadgets.

[source: Speciality Fabrics Review]

We have highlighted many times before the usefulness of wearable technologies in the field of medical care, to improve the living quality of those who need assistance and for the improved service quality of those who take care.

Australian based Simavita came up with a solution primarily for the aging population with increased risk of incontinence, persons that can not hold it back to pee.

The SIMsystem™ (‘Smart Incontinence Management’) consists of underpants equipped with a disposable pad with a wetness sensor that records the incontinence data and sends it to a central computer via ZigBee® standard which is a very low-power and low-range wireless applications.

This low power technology eliminates the risk of any electrical shock and has been approved for body-worn products.

As the incontinence event happens a text alert is transmitted through the care facility’s paging system alerting the care taker to jump into action.

Medical care and lifestyle improving aspects of life offer such a wide and interesting field for wearable technology, it comes to no surprise to see developments like this coming up in the years ahead.

Texting underpants? Why not, it all comes down to the usefulness (or the lack off) such groundbreaking innovations.

[via: Physorg]

One of the most extraordinary carpet designs I have seen comes from the Dutch company LAMA Concept. Called the LED Cell rug, made from pure wool felt strips with embedded LEDs that blend perfectly into the over carpet design.

I give the label ‘extraordinary’ because the designers of these carpet, Yvonne Laurysen and Erik Mantel, combined felt – believed to be one of the earliest techniques for making textiles with 21st Century eTextile technology to create this remarkable flexible carpet design.

The use of 100% pure wool felt, which is pressed and cut into strings, makes it a natural product which is non-flammable, soundproofing and water-repellent. These properties led to a showcase product for Airbus which covered the flooring of a business class cabin with the LED cell, giving a look of glowing gem stones radiating luxury and soft light.

The unique design in form of felt strings has the advantage to make rugs at any size easily and to replace simply the string where a damage on the carpet happens, no need to replace the whole carpet.

I like the simplicity of the concept and design, making the LED cell carpet a shining example of textile illumination.