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]

There is a high probability the Climate Dress was made by a Danish cooperation consisting of design studio Diffus, Danish designer Tine M. Jensen, Swiss embroidery company Forster-Rohner, the Danish research-company Alexandra Institute and finally the Danish School of Design.

Sadly, the recently broken closed down climate conference COP15 did not come up with any significant agreement or result on addressing the arising problems CO2 has on pour climate, the Climate Dress might be the best thing to look for now.

The Climate Dress is made of conductive embroidery and contains over hundred LEDs inserted into the embroidery.

The twist on this dress: it includes a CO2 sensor which monitors the surrounding air for the CO2 level, send the data to a LilyPad Arduino which then visualizes the pollution level via LED light pattern on the dress.

While the presentation of this functionality could have been done in a more ‘work-wear’ or other professional clothing item, alerting persons working in hazardous environments, I love the presentation in from of an fashionable dress which, to my opinion, is hammering home the message of CO2 and climate change more powerful than it would have been in work-wear.

The team around the Climate Dress did a very good job in designing a meaningful, wearable electronic object which points into a direction where we might end up having CO2 scanner and visualizer in our everyday clothing to see when it’s time to go indoors or to other less polluted places.

We received a notice from Alvaro Cassinelli, member of the Haptic Radar project team from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The Haptic Radar project is running for some time with continuous improvements that might lead one day soon to a concept that could jump over to the commercial world.

The motivation for this project is to allow users to perceive and respond to spatial information using haptic cues in an intuitive and unobtrusive way. The system is build of an array of ‘optical-hair modules’, each of which senses range information and transduces it as an vibro-tactile cue on the skin.

The artificial sensory system replicates the cellular cilia, insect antennae, as well as the specialized sensory hairs of mammalian whiskers like cats whiskers.

The ultimate target of the team is to build  artificial, wearable, light-based hairs which will be an invisible, steerable laser beam. Modules that are miniaturized enough to be integrated into fabrics can add another dimension to truly intelligent, sensible clothing.

The target market for such sensible clothing is diverse, ranging from aiding visually impaired people to navigate through the world without the need of using obvious aids like sticks or workers in hazardous environments like construction sides where heavy objects float around. Haptic Radar enhanced clothing will be  valuable in such areas to prevent accidents.

Like the Sonar Garment from Lynne Brunning, the Haptic Radar project is an excellent example of how clothing can give back some of the senses we lost when starting cover up our body or even enhance our sensory ability through clothing with the help of wearable technologies.

Check out the Haptic Radar project site for more details and some videos demonstrating how the artificial cat whiskers work.

After writing about the Wearable Friend Finder, I was on the lookout if there are any other design concepts around the idea of bringing the social networking trend and the personalization desire for clothing together.

My find of the day: ‘OSMO the Custom Social Network‘ is envisioning participants of social networks to customize clothing with smart, flex-image fabric.

It is ‘networked and alive’ and communicates with your iPhone applications, detects ‘friends’ from your Loopt™ profile and picks up and displays images from other participants in close proximity.

In case you wonder if such concept ideas are going ‘over-the-top’ or are a bit to geek of far fetched, think about how clothing is used since the days people started covering up their nudity: as an expression of belonging to a specific group, profession, religion, culture, political movement. Wearing T-shirts with images of celebrities, a favorite band and singer, sports teams of persons, the list is very long.

Wearing ones social (online) network on clothing can and will be just another form of showing a dedication and admiration to certain interests. Currently traditional materials in clothing do not support the frequent and instant changes we are used to get in our online social networking environment.

Wearable technologies can provide the means to transform the static clothing world from yesteryear to the dynamic, fast changing world of today and tomorrow. It will just be a matter of time until the technologies are ready to take on the new trends in lifestyle and fashion.

[source: Creating Space via The Design Blog]

New Media students at the University of Maine developed a Wearable Friend Finder that brings the match making, friend(ster) finding out of the internet and onto the streets.

In their last semester’s interactive Web development class the students created the electronic Friend Finder, a wearable device designed to help people make a personal connection and break the ice.

The students initially envisioned the Friend Finder as a dating service on campus, working from the premise that if a person were given more information about the personalities of the people they pass by, other then what they see, they would be more likely to break the ice and start a conversation.

How does it work? Users enter their preferences and personality traits into a computer program and upload the information to a small, portable device. The user then plugs the device into a shirt or handbag wired with small LED lights incorporated into the design. When users with similar preferences come within 30 feet of each other, the clothing or bag lights up, making it easier to spot a potential match in a crowd.

Other uses than matchmaking could be for making business contacts (like LinkedIn) where people give indicators of interests and the system tries to link up like minded. The wearable Friend Finder principle could be very well useful during large business gatherings like an exhibition where thousands of like minded people are roaming the show floor and try to link up. This the indicator, hidden somewhere on a more discrete location on a business outfit or a bag could help to speed up finding matching business partners.

Here is a short video showing the Wearable Friend Finder in action:

The potential use(fulness) of this concept is huge and I hope this will be taken up soon be a young, dynamic like/open minded company to bring it to the market.

[source: University of Main via Bangor Daily News]

Adidas is taking the lead when it comes to highly fashionable and very smart fitness clothing. After the launch of the AdiStar Fusion selection in 2007, Adidas expanded their smart fitness apparel collection adding different styles for men and women.

The latest collection of the Adidas Fusion and the new miCoach fitness apparel range use textile electrodes seamless integrated into the shirts and tops fabric taking away the ‘not so favorable’ look when using HRM and the highly uncomfortable wear feel of conventional chest-strap like HRM devices.

Adidas teamed also up with Samsung Electronics and made the intelligent fitness apparel range compatible with the miCoach training system that includes a quad band slider phone from Samsung acting as a fitness trainer, a heart rate monitor tuning into the rhythm of the user’s body, a stride sensor to measure speed and distance while running (when the miCoach sports shoe) and a web workout journal to help people design and keep track of fitness programs.

A highly sophisticated system linking the data collected from the smart clothing to online services for performance tracking and sharing with team members of friends.

An almost perfect scenario which I can envision interactive, intelligent clothing will be heading.

Adidas smart fitness apparel also work with Polar’s Wearlink sensor so if you own already a Polar system you just need to select one of the gorgeous looking fitness fashion shirts and tops and you are good to go.

There are many online shops selling the Adidas smart fitness fashion collection so we just give one example of where to start looking around.

Upgrade your fitness wardrobe to be ready for the the coming spring/summer season.

Adidas is the first place to check out when it comes to truly smart, intelligent fitness apparel and shoes.

O’Neill prepares to launch the NavJacket for the winter season 2008/09. Introduced end of last year, this ground breaking intelligent jacket proofs once again the innovative leadership of O’Neill’s H-Division team in the wearable electronic market.

The final version of the NavJacket has a slightly different arm display than the prototype seen before, a more conventional color LCD display similar as we use in our electronic gadgets although snugly integrated and protected against rough rides down the slopes.

The NavJacket helps navigating in the wilderness of the mountains, especially when visibility becomes suddenly low. Enter the place you want to end up and it will guide you down safely.

Another cool feature is the ‘friend finder’ allowing to find your friends on the slopes or follow them down the path they took.

The NavJacket is made of high performance Gore-Tex ® material. Price and effective launch date is not yet available but we will stay on the lookout and post about as soon as it becomes public.

I have to close this post with a side remark: GPS functionality fully integrated into an outdoor jacket seems to me more sensible compared to the currently widely publicized GPS Lingerie from Brazil by which I don’t really get the point of the sensibility neither why one could not but a pocket GPS in any kind of clothing, not just a see-through lingerie pocket.

A combination of fashion and high-tech function the SmartNoti, short for for Smart Notification, is a unique solution for the common problem people like you and me exhibit too often: misplace or leave behind our personal belongings.

SmartNoti, designed by Georgia Institute of Technology students Nicholas Komor, Sidhant Gupta and Mayank Goel is a is Bluetooth based feature integrated into a hooded jacket. The user can tag his/her personal belongings like an MP3 player, cell phone, wallet or keys with small Bluetooth markers.

Whenever the user gets out of range of his/her belongings, the hooded jacket will start vibratiing and/or gives LED flashing light alert. The lights and vibrations can be customized to the user’s preferences.

Team member Nicholas Komor, an industrial design student with aspirations in fashion, designed the garment considering the best, most visible placement for the SmartNoti and keeping in mind the aesthetic requirements of style and materials.

A unique design feature is the way SmartNoti is used: by flipping up the hood, the wearer signals that he or she is talking on a Bluetooth device as passers-by sometimes mistakenly think someone is talking to them while actually using a Bluetooth headset.

By pulling up the hood the wearer visibly cuts out the world from his/her communication.

Misplacement and forgetting personal items is a very common symptom and delegating ‘do not forget me‘ to my outfit would be cool, allowing me to think about the more important things in life than keeping track of my cellphone all time.

Check out the SmartNoti in action:

SmartNoti was one of the projects coming out of a class on Wearable Electronics during the Fall Semester 2007 taught by Clint Zeagler and Thad Starner. This class was the first partnership between the Computer Science and Industrial Design departments at Georgia set up to demonstrate how technological innovation must meet functionality and pleasing aesthetics to create a marketable product.

Our frequent readers of talk2mySirt have noticed we have change the style of our blog. We did keep the base character the same but made a ‘fresher’, ‘brighter’ look and feel.

Our motivator behind the style change is to make browsing through our growing information data base as easy and convenient as possible. We moved all navigation items to the right screen side. We have added to a more easier to browse ‘Category’ section the ‘Archives’ to browse along the time line. A tag cloud has been added as well to give you a quick view what our main focus is on.

Subscription for our email updates and rss can be found right on the top, easy to see and quick to reach.

This new style is more flexible when it comes to expansion and adding new functions which we will do as we see the need or get suggestion from our readership.

At this point we would like you our dear reader to give us your valuable opinion and suggestions what you would like us to add or change. Our aim is to make browsing our blog as easy and fast as possible.

What we did not change and will not change is the content. We keep on searching restlessly for new products in the wearable electronic market, for new technologies to report about and introduce initiatives and works from all the creative people around the world who share with us the enthusiasm into wearable electronic and intelligent clothing.

The Vital Jacket® is an intelligent wearable garment that is able to continuously monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) wave and Heart Rate as used in medical environment, high performance sports and fitness.

The company behind this futuristic Jacket/Shirt is Biodevices, S.A., a spin-off from IEETA (Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro / University of Aveiro, Portugal) with the mission of developing and commercializing biomedical solutions for diagnosis and monitoring support.

The Vital Jacket® is a wearable vital signs monitoring system that joins textiles with microelectronics. It was designed and developed to be a usable pragmatic approach for different clinical and normal life scenarios, in hospitals, home or on the move, that need continuous or frequent high quality vital signs monitoring.

The benefit of Bio-monitoring clothing is obvious: more freedom of movement and independence from stationary treatment for patients or elderly who need special care and quality data collection in high performance sport as well as for fitness enthusiasts.

There are currently two versions available, the HWM100 that stores data on a SD memory card for post-analysis on a PC. This version allows long term monitoring. Users can define heart rate limits and will be alerted through a vibration alarm embedded in the T-Shirt.

The second version is the HWM200 that allows realtime visualization where data is sent via Bluetooth to a PDA or smart phone.

Both VitalJacket versions are ready for pre-order at a price of €399.- / $635.44 (excluding PDA) on VitalJacket’s Website. Shipment is indicated as begin of 2008 so it should be very soon.