The Pulse Sensor is a plug-and-play ready component that hooks up to the Arduino platform which opens a ton of possibilities to incorporate biometric data into wearable electronic designs thanks to it’s very small form factor.

The creator of the Pulse Sensor, Joel Murphy and Yury Gitman, set up a Kickstarter account to get the necessary funding and move that great idea from  prototype stage into mass produced, open source reality.

The Pulse Sensor works similar to a optical heart-rate pulse sensor, picking up the blood flow rate, preferable on a ear lobe or finger tip, via photodiode. It is not intended to be of medical grade accuracy but still – it gives highly reliable values according the the duo’s own testing.

With just 1/2 inch in diameter (about 12mm), looking like a piece of jewelry and having two holes to sew the button shaped Pulse Sensor to fabric, this little bugger is inviting itself for an easy integration into wearable tech designs that react and act in sync with the heart beat of the wearer.

You can find all the details about the Pulse Sensor on Kickstarter and on The Pulse Sensor home page. If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on the Pulse Sensor – you can still pledge your contribution to the already well funded project until Sept 7 and get the Pulse Sensor Kit including Software & Source Code, PDF User-Guide, and a “Special Thanks” on PulseSensor.com

[via: GizmoWatch]

Based on the feedback we receive on talk2myShirt and my personal experience, illuminated textiles, be it for clothing or interior design, never fails to trigger instant, highly emotionally charged reactions from everyone around when seeing textile objects suddenly light up, changing their color.

I am not talking about blinking, cheaply made decals, I am referring to ascetically sophisticated designs using soft light effects to emphasize the softness of fabric.

Technological developments into light emitting textiles are mostly at their early proof-of-concept stage and there is no reliable, commercially available product on the market for designer to use.

Nevertheless, many companies spend considerable resources to crack the technical difficulties and each new development is a potential step forward to unleash the powerful magic of textile illumination.

One such effort, more suitable for interior design than clothing design is coming from Japan’s Tsuya Textile Co., in cooperation with the Fukui Engineering Center. Their collaboration project ‘Delight Cloth‘ is a light emitting textile made from thin optical fibers measuring just 0.25 to 0.5 mm in diameter.

These optical fibers are woven to fabric sheets which can be used to cover ceilings, walls or furniture to provide a soft flowing and soft illumination for interior decoration.

I keep on mentioning interior because the ‘Delight Cloth’ will need a 100W to 150W light source connected to the fiber-optic ends of the woven cloth to send light, which could have any color, over the whole length of the cloth.

Not really a portable, wearable solution but for interior decoration an almost perfect technology to spread some soft and surprising magic around a room.

If you are planning to add some sparkle to your next fashion collection maybe Luminex could be your choice as they are offering a very similar fiber optic woven textile which seems is more suitable for a portable, wearable solution.

Oh well, a lot of people in the northern hemisphere had their share of cold, sun light deprived winter weather but rest assured, the next summer season will come soon and with it plenty of sun light hours per day.

We will soon have a look to the latest collection of sun hungry solar bags but for today we have a fabric solar panel for your consideration that can serve as sun-shade on your patio and will generate lot of electrical power at the same time.

A company called ShadePlex is offering this powerful sun shade textile. Actually the textile itself is not power generating but serves as a frame for the flexible solar panels giving them support and a means to be used as sunshades or to cover other objects with sun power generating ability.

These solar power fabrics are light weight compared with conventional metal framed solar panels, can be stored easily by rolling up and can be put up in sunny places as easy as to place a sun umbrella or tent.

Properties our adventure trip loving readers who want to explore the remote corners of our world could consider, helping to keep the GPS and other devices alive. No need to lug around heavy batteries that need to be disposed somewhere.

But not so fast, ShadePlex is just starting operation and will serve first B2B which means it will take some time until you could consider having solar fabric as part of the adventure travel gear – just let’s hope it won’t take too long.

[source]

We got word from a Taiwanese manufacturer who has developed a textile ribbon using a new, low resistant electrically conductive yarn with LEDs mounted on a ribbon which can be cut to sizes as needed and then connected to a control and power supply unit to light up this textile string.

Our source told us this product has passed the development and pre-production tests and will be commercially available in January 2010. Pricing is not fixed yet but should come end of this month.

Here are some of the unique features the Luminous textile ribbon offers:

The textile substrate can be any conventional type of fabric like polyester, nylon, polyethylene, …

The appearance of the Luminous textile ribbon can be finished by traditional textile techniques such as dying and printing.

The current maximum length of the Luminous textile ribbon is 300 cm but a next the generation will push this to up to 100m.

The SMD LEDs are mounted on the ribbon via a specially developed process, keeping the Luminous textile ribbon light wight and flexible like any conventional textile ribbon.

Best of all – the Luminous textile ribbon can be used in water. A great concern in textile electronic is the functionality of such products when it comes in contact with water, a situation clothing and bags are usually exposed.

This amazing Luminous textile ribbon seems to offer a cut-to-measure, water resistant, textile like illumination option for forward thinking fashion designer.

If you can’t wait until more details about the Luminous textile ribbon become available on talk2myShirt and like to get in direct contact with this company, please drop us a line via the ‘Contact us‘ function (on the top of the right side panel on our blog layout) and we will connect you with the company representatives.

The Luminous textile ribbon features sound pretty amazing. It will be the first commercially available textile illumination technology ready for the consumer market.

Fibretronic launched a new range of high brightness LED products designed for lighting applications in outerwear, bags and other wearable accessories.

The lighting range, which Fibretronic is selling under the ‘i-Lume‘ brand, includes light emitting buttons which can be sewn or bonded into clothing to add high visibility features.

Pressing the buttons will turn the light on/off or to make it flash. They are available in a variety of colors and the button molding can be customized to a specific logo or design.

Included in the i-Lume range is a high brightness torch module, designed to be sewn or bonded into jackets, gloves or backpacks, giving off a light beam when needed. The torch module includes a light, an on/off switch and textile cable which connects to a small battery controller that can be stowed in a pocket.

I fin this range of soft illumination modules highly interesting and useful a brands can just ‘drop in’ this features into their clothing of bag products as special edition.

Having light during foggy days or at night while venturing around the great outdoors is always a good and save idea. These modules could be very interesting for kids clothing and school bags to give them another layer of visibility. Active light emitting light sources are more effective than reflecting strips on clothing or bags.

Push-to-talk 2 my Shirt might not be as far away as we have imagined when giving our name to our wearable electronic community site back in 2006.

Finnish company Patria Aviation Oy has spent the past one and a half years to develop a flexible, fabric based antenna that can be integrated into a Shirt.

The project’s biggest challenge was the selection of a fabric which can maintain a strong radio signal even when the patch is bent vertically, horizontally or diagonally.

The flexible antenna connects to Iridium satellites whose low-altitude operations do not require large antennas and to GPS for location information.

The radiating patch antenna is shielded against environmental conditions by a protective layer. The selected geometry conforms with the stringent requirements from Iridium and GPS by maintaining ‘circular polarization’ of its radio signal over the full bandwidth even when bent, a commonly recognized difficulty in the design of soft, wearable antennas.

Patria Aviation Oy demonstrated successfully the high-tech clothing that can send and receive messages via satellite by called the Netherlands from their headquarters in Finland by using the prototype antenna.

Eventually, a communication module will be integrated into the antenna patch which would create the first thoroughly wearable cell phone in form of a dress or shirt, ultimately enabling us to: talk2myShirt.

[source: ESA via Gizmodo]

MIT‘s Media Lab is without question one of the hot spots for research and pioneering wearable technologies since it’s very early stage. No wonder that many of the innovative companies in this field are coming directly out of their laboratories.

One of the latest start-up company in the wearable technology field is Affectiva, a Waltham-based company that will make wearable sensors for people with autism, planning to commercialize the iCalm concept developed by the Media Lab in their first product called ‘Q’, a textile wristband with built-in bio-sensors.

The sensors measuring skin conductivity to get a handle on what is happening with the wearer’s emotions and transmit wirelessly the data to a computer for data visualization and recording.

The wearable, wireless sensor platform allows comfortable, long-term sensing of physiological information coupled with low-cost connectivity to consumer devices including mobile phones and the laptop.

Possible applications for the wearable bio sensor include health monitoring for outpatients or elderly, communication of affective information for people who are non-speaking or otherwise interested in sharing this information, education for individuals who want to learn about their own internal physiological changes during daily life and  will be very useful for people with autism, their parents, and the therapists who work with them.

[via: Boston Globe]

Following up on the release of the Smart Textile Saloon exhibition list released last week, I am collecting more information (where available) about the projects on stage.

The wearable CO2 sensor, developed by Tanja Radu, Cormac Fay, King Tong Lau and Dermot Diamond at CLARITY (Centre for Sensor Web Technologies at Dublin City University) is a highly interesting topic .

Wearable gas sensors are not yet very common but interesting not only for emergency disaster clothing but also in other areas where detection and indication of hazardous gases like CO and CO2 are off concern.

The development of the Wearable CO2 sensor is part of the European project Proetex which aims to develop textile and fiber-based wearable sensor systems to improve the safety and efficiency of emergency personnel by monitoring the health status of the operator and the surrounding environment for potential risk sources.

The CO2 sensor is placed in a specially designed pocket located on the firefighter’s boot and a CO sensor in the firefighter’s garment. Both integrations are designed to protect the sensors but not to obstruct the firefighter’s activities.

Via a low power, wireless Zigbee link the sensor data can be send to the command station which monitors the rescue operation.

The project started in 2006 with an end date in early 2010 so I expect the models on exhibit at the Smart Textile Saloon will be the most advanced, wearable gas sensor designs.

Sensor integration into clothing, be it for professional, medical or sports clothing have the advantage of being unobtrusive, ‘always around’ (the body) to monitor our physical parameters and the immediate environment around our body for hazardous situations.

We could use stand alone sensor units and place them in our pockets or stick to our skin, but this requires quite some ‘dressing up’ time, the possibility of forgetting and/or losing such small devices during the action.

Philips Lumalive commissioned a new promo video for their LED based light emitting textile technology.

The video, called ‘Human Synthesizer‘, made by made by Jasmin Jodry from th1ng, visually explains the benefits of transforming garments into communication platforms via the Lumalive textile display.

Up to now Philips Lumalive technology has been marketed only towards the promotion industry which is utilizing the eye and attention catching magic illuminated clothing creates.

Maybe in making a promotional video about this technology will lead one day soon to the launch of Lumalive into the consumer market?

Having a shirt, dress or jacket that shows mood icons, logos of favorite bands, groups or just random effects would be …. magical as this soft, textile display is.

Lumalive’s textile display is based on a layer of flexible substrate on which the RGB (red, green and blue color) LEDs are mounted in a matrix of 14×14 pixels spread over an area of 20cm (8 inches) square.

Each pixel (LED) can be individually addressed as well as the intensity of each color varied, allowing to visualize almost any color.

The LED layer is covered with water repellent textiles for protection, diffusion of the pixels to give off a soft light and to have a textile like, tactile feeling.

A control unit provides the display with content of up to  10 minutes of unique animations which can be downloaded via USB from a computer. The rechargeable Li-ion battery provides power to the display for 3 to 4 hours.

Photos of ‘Lumalive inside‘ can be found on Leah Buechley’s Flickr stream.

[via: Dexigner]

Triggered by a question from one of our dear readers about possible technologies usable to add light-up elements to clothing designs, I have been looking around if there is anything else next to Photochromic yarns or the glow-in-the-dark yarns which both need light to trigger the color change.

EL-foil technology is another option providing a very thin design solution but it is rather challenging to get custom made design in small quantities.

Using low profile LEDs could be used as well but needs many LEDs to get a continuous line of light. On the other hand, LEDs can be switched on/off or otherwise manipulated for their light output.

My search for more options came up with EL-wires or very thin EL strings which come very close to be used as illuminating yarn. Offered by a company called NeonString, their ‘Angel hair’ EL string is just 1.2mm thick, can be bend up to 180 degrees and come in a variety of colors: Aqua, Blue, Lime Green, Red, White, Yellow, Green and Purple with a price of $1.05 per foot.

To have a functional EL wire solution you need to have a driver electronic as well. Here comes the second very pleasant surprise from this company: their smallest driver which will work perfectly with the Angel hair EL string is very, very tiny, weights only 0.2 oz (less than 6 gram) and runs on 1.5V DC so you can use a small battery as well. This tiny driver can light up a string of up to 1.5 feet and is selling for $5.50

If you need longer light elements, there are bigger but still very small driver option available at the same store.

For people with little or no knowledge about electronics, NeonString offers to solder the driver to the string when indicated during ordering.

One word of caution: this very thing EL string does not have the usual PVC coating protection and outdoor use is not recommended but if you take care in your design and add some protective layer on top of it, I guess it should be fine to use in clothing projects.

If you are looking for a way to light up your next fashion design project, this is certainly an option to look at during your design stage.