Adding audio control and cell phone navigation to gloves is not an entirely new idea, we have seen many concept designs and a few commercial ski gloves from various brands over the past few years doing that. Even gloves that make phone calls came along but none of these products made a real dent in the techno glove market.

Based on that precondition entrepreneur Willie Blount picked up the glove control idea, gave it a careful thought of what might have been the problem in the past and came up with a brilliant solution for the future: the BEARTek Bluetooth glove.

Recognizing the high cost of the electronic part in wearable electronics, a negative cost impact of a full integration of the electronic which might double the cost of a pair of gloves he designed a modular, exchangeable and upgradable solution.

BEARTek gloves themselves contain the switches, eTextile touch areas in fingers and thumb and a pocket that connects, holds and protects the expensive BlueTooth module.

The glove can be used without any electronic, just a cool designed glove or transformed into a smart glove by inserting the BT module.

Better yet, when the glove design goes out of fashion, change to a new pair of gloves, obviously from BEARTek, and connect again with your beloved electronic device. An additional benefit of such modular system: as technological developments advance faster than fashion trends, whenever there is a new wireless link available or new functions are the new ‘must haves’ just replace the module in the glove for an upgrade.

That all sounds cool but we are not there yet, BEARTek gloves are not yet ready for prime-time shopping – this project just passed the prototyping stage and is is now looking for funding to start up manufacturing. If you are interested and want to secure your first smart glove – now you have the possibility to make that happen and to get even your special design – depending on the amount of funding you provide.

Here is the link for more details about the BEARTek start-up project.

In case you wonder about the name BEARTek, it stands for: Bluetooth Enabled Audio Regulation Technology

While currently the main focus is on Audio and obviously cell phone control I can very well imagine such Bluethooth glove control could find a place among the professional, work wear sector where wearing gloves is standard procedure but still have the need to connect to electronic equipment.

Touch screen gloves connecting people to their smart devices are commercially launched in a massive way this year but some innovative people like Jeff Rowberg think ahead transform a simple glove into a very smart input device, taking away the touch screen altogether.

It’s kinda logical to add computer brain power to gloves as our hands are a vital communication element. Fitting gloves with smart eTextile elements like Jeff proposes in his Keyglove design allows our hands to talk to a computer.

The basic idea of the Keyglove is to generate signals similar to the one produced from a conventional keyboard by touching different combination of fingers and position on the finger to generate the numbers.

The Keygloves input concept works similar to the input on older cell phone keypads. Touch and stretch sensors throughout the glove pick up the gestures and convert into computer understandable signals. An on-glove accelerometer is used for mouse control functionality.

Jeff figured out that ‘using simple one-to-one sensor combination (made by touching one sensor to only one other sensor), there are 59 ergonomically easy possibilities.‘

The complete detailed work in progress on the Keyglove is very well documented on Jeff’s Keyglove blog, a huge source of information around and about gloves and includes a ‘Build your own’ Keyglove tutorial.

What could be the best places for the Keyglove to shine? I would imagine for people who have to input simple commands or information like in warehouses, logistic centers or in-the-field service personal where carrying around even small devices of the iPad style or even PDA form factors are already too cumbersome to take care during the action.

If you are interested into a commercial product out of this fabulous concept, click over to the Keyglove site and participate in the voting on the right screen side.

We have extended our touch screen gloves Giveaway until Monday Nov. 22nd giving all our reader time over the weekend to tell us how you will connect during the winter time with gloved hands to your smart touch screen devices.

Just a short note – we are curious how the smart screens and the cold weather change the interaction between Humans and Machines.

Send your thoughts or work around solutions to editor@talk2myshirt.com using an email address we can then contact you to send you a pair of smarTouch gloves from Isotoner which are capable to make this connection while keeping your fingers cozy warm.

All emails we receive until Nov 22th 11:59 pm ET will be entered in the lucky draw. This Giveaway is open only to individuals who are residents of the United States.

As most of the newer personal devices feature touch sensitive input usually via the screen, operating them during cold winter days can become an annoyance. Conventional, old tech gloves have to be taken off before one can even pick up a phone call.

See, electronic technology advances at a high speed but we or our clothing sometimes fall behind this rapid development and we are not able to operate them properly at times.

Touch sensitive gloves have been around for a year now as some innovative minds figured out the problem and a solution by adding conductive yarn patches on the tip of the index finger which will make the necessary skin resistance contact with the touch screens’ surface.

As with any new innovation and product idea, over time simple and limited offers on the market will expand through new companies joining the this market segment.

Gaspar Gloves is offering for this winter season a range of TouchTec® gloves which are based on a patented nano-technology that gives new functionality to a variety of textiles and leather. It enables the wearer of TouchTec Gloves to operate any touch screen devices without removing gloves.

The touch sensible gloves come in a range of different styles for women and men and can be picked up here with prices ranging from $225.- up to almost $300.- but how much value would you put on having warm fingers while operating your touch sensitive devices?

[via: ChipChick]

According to a Discovery News article, researches modified a fingerless biker glove by adding 17 electrically sensitive patches over major muscle groups in the hand and lower arm.

The detected muscle movements are then wireless transmitted to a computer which make the data analysis of translating the different changes on the muscles into written words – if the program is trained to interpret them as text writing.

The current prototype setup manages a 63 percent accuracy by only five repetition/training sessions per letter. After 35 repetitions, the computers accuracy hit 97 percent.

A quite impressive result which I remember is similar to the early voice recognition programs for the computer market.

Michael Linderman, a neuroscientist and co-author of the article published in the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS), creating a commercial glove using Bluetooth to write one-handed text messages wouldn’t be difficult.

The only concern he has is the estimated cost of such smart air writing glove which is in the area of $100.-

If this turns out this is too expensive for the texting community, there is the option to use this technology for the medical area to detect for example the early stages of the Parkinson diseases as handwriting consists of memory, knowledge, cognition and dexterity, a process that is very sensitive to the general state of the nervous system.

[via: Gizmowatch]