SYSTEX in connection with Ghent University – Department of Textiles is inviting the wearable electronic community to submit projects for this years SYSTEX Student Award 2010 and Smart-Textiles-Salon 2010.

Our extensive coverage about the SYSTEX Student Award 2009 may serve as inspirational source and motivation to participate in this years event.

Last years winner was Laura Wilson with her project the ‘Celestial Hybrid’.

To participate in the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 is easy: send a report about your project together with a your CV by email to Lieva.VanLangenhove@UGent.be with cc to: Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be or snail-mail the documents to the address indicated on the SYSTEX Student Award 2010 Website.

The deadline for submitting your project is June 30th 2010, still some time to formalize your great idea around smart textiles.

For more information click over to SYSTEX Student Award 2010 or check out the leaflet (link to .pdf document).

Your project, if selected will have the chance to be presented at the Smart Textiles Salon in autumn 2010.

Pretty Smart Textiles is the name of an exhibition about and around the latest innovations in eTextiles from Dutch artists and designers including Daan Roosegaarde, Maartje Dijkstra, Meg Grant, Nicky Assmann, Dorith Sjardijn, Melissa Coleman, Heike Sperber, Marina Venendaal, Karina van Heck, Florian Kräutli, Aduen Darriba, Joachim Rotteveel, Anouk Wipprecht, Charlotte ‘t Hart, Evelyn Lebis, Paula Kassenaar, Paula Segura Meccia and Mark Kwikkers.

Design.nl published a interview with the curators Melissa Coleman and Dorith Sjardijn about the motivation behind the exhibition and their view of the future of smart textiles.

Views and insights regular talk2myShirt reader will be familiar with like the recent trend of illuminated stage wear by artists, usually a field where visual attraction and clothing innovation trends make their first public appearance before catching the high street fashion market.

The interview provides interesting views about the ‘magic factor’ electronics can give to textile and clothing. The fascination of transforming, illuminating, singing textiles from visitors.

A highly recommended ‘must read article’ advice from my side. If you are near or around The Netherlands, maybe you can plan a side trip to the Nutshuis in The Hague. The ‘Pretty Smart Textiles’ exhibition is running until June 24, 2010

Wearable technologies or smart textiles are of high interest among the medical community as these technologies promise to enable more accurate monitoring of patients while giving more dignity and convenience to the patients in form of discretely integrated sensors into clothing.

Although wearable technology development has made significant steps towards this goal most of the technologies are still too immature to be used in the medical domain.

TecInTex, a research program at Nano-Tera is one of the initiatives to find solutions to the present technological gaps by developing textile-based advanced (electrical or optical) fibers incorporating sensors, signal transmission or other active components based on nanotechnology.

The expectation of this research program is to develop a family of ’sensorized’ and functional fibers, which will allow the measurement of body functions like continuous ECG monitoring and biological species in body proximity, approved fabrication processes and working prototypes dedicated for health care, rehabilitation and prevention.

Read the full article at +Plastic Electronics which features a interview with Kunigunde Cherenack, senior research fellow at the ETH Wearable Computing Lab, who is working on the TecInTex smart textile project, explaining the opportunities but also the short comings of the current sate of eTextile technologies.

Students frequently ask me about ideas of where do concentrate in the development of eTextiles. This article can serve as inspiration about technologies and techniques currently rather ‘under-developed’ – providing a field full of opportunities to investigate.

One of the most interesting aspect of smart, sensible clothing is the integration of sensors that visualize environmental conditions we cant’s see or smell easily or to visualize such parameters to warn us when they reach health threatening levels.

The Breathless Corset and the Climate Dress both have sensors that detect and indicate high levels of CO2 by taking away our breath or indicate elevated CO2 levels via light elements integrated into the dress.

The Detectair jacket, designed by industrial design students Genevieve Mateyko and Pamela Troyer at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Canada, senses and indicates toxins like Alcohol, benzene, carbon dioxide, ammonia, nitrogen oxide in the air around us.

The indication of elevated levels of toxins is made visually with LEDs arranged to symbolize the lungs branches of blood vessels and additionally with small vibrators inside the jacket.

Clothing acts like our second skin, if we make our second skin more sensible it not only offers new ways of creating style elements but it could as well assist people which are more sensitive to this kind of pollutants to be alerted well in advance to give them time to go to more clearer, safer places.

[via: Fashioning Technology]

Just in time at the eve of the iPad launch, new gloves technology could be seen on the MacWorld last week.

iTouch gloves are different to all the other touch screen compatible gloves we have seen so far. The iTouch leather gloves don’t have any style interrupting dots or conductive squares that make the fingertips conduct electricity between you and the iPhone and other touch scree devices.

iTouch gloves use a ‘patent-pending’ technology called TouchTec which begins during the leather tanning and stretching process and involves nanotechnology treatment while it’s being stretched giving the whole glove the skin to touch screen connection.

I am quite impressed how the garment industry catches up on a rather new technology like touch screens which have been around on a larger consumer products scale for a few years. In these few years they had to figure out the fundamentals and bring them to an industrial scale production. Really impressive and innovative.

iTouch gloves are available in different styles with prices varying between $99.- to $195.- When the iPad hits the stores your well protected hands will be ready for the big touch on the iPad.

[via: Ars Technica]

Sensible, sensing clothing are a fascinating topic which has got the intention of a highly creative team which integrates Merlin Stretch Sensor into beautifully designed garment to sense the wearers movement. The movement data can then be used for various purposes like interaction with a garments appearance, interaction with other smart sensing garments or interaction with the environment.

The project is called ‘Aeolia‘ with the purpose to explore concepts of our bodily engagement with the land and ideas of space and place.

Each of the back forms incorporate the Merlin stretch sensor into an aesthetic exploration of textile technique mapped to the body – weave (grey), knit (white) and embroidery (black).

The knit samples use a Bekaert yarn with standard shirring elastic to create an experimental stretch sensor based on the changing length of the conductive path.

A Merlin Stretch Sensor measures stretch, displacement, compression and force. It is a flexible cylindrical cord with electrical fixings at each end. The sensor behaves like a variable resistor, the more you stretch it the higher the resistance. You can find here some Merlin Stretch Sensors if you like to experiment with this technology.

Check out the Aeolia project page which contains video clips showing how a stretch sensing textile patch manipulates music. This concept could make interesting stage wear for artist who can influence their musical performance with their movement on stage.

Aeolia is a collaboration between many people from different disciplines, most of them working at Nottingham Trent University:

Philip Breedon in Product Design and Amanda Briggs-Goode in Textiles head the project with Sarah Kettley. Martha Glazzard developed the knit stretch sensors, Tina Downes made the embroidered sample, Karen Harrigan works across the project on garment fit and Nigel Marshall is working on woven structures.

A fantastic team that stretches the future of fashion design imagination.

[via: electricfoxy]

Today is not only the day wearable electronic experts and enthusiasts meet at the Smart Textile Salon in Ghent, Belgium but also the day where Laura Wilson will present her SysTex Student Award 2009 winning project, the ‘Celestial Hybrid’.

Laura Wilson, currently completing her final year of her degree in Printed Textiles, Fashion and Fibre at Winchester School of Art has a very unique approach to intelligent, technology enabled textiles.

Her aim is to use technology to enhance textiles by giving them properties to follow the desire of change to adapt and adjust to various stimuli in our society.

For Laura, our trend obsessed ‘fast fashion’ culture, like most parts of today’s lifestyle, generates mountains of ‘outdated’ products. On the other hand, change, the fluidity of life encourages the disposability, even implies the acceptance of such practice.

In the search for a sensible balance between consumerism and the need of sustainability, Laura started to explore the benefits wearable technologies can offer to create changeable, upgradeable, adaptive textiles.

Her aim is to create adaptive textiles that adjust with time and climate to meet the needs of different people in different societies, to create clothing people can update rather than replace.

Laura is placing a high priority to the aesthetic appearance of her technology enabled textiles but at the same time takes great care to create smart textiles that can become ‘usable’ and ‘affordable’ in the near future.

The use of conductive yarns, LEDs, optical fibers, Thermochromatic and Photochromatic paints on textile structures merge into living, changing, transforming, color shifting surfaces which adapt constantly in sync with the wearers movement, action and journey through life.

I am sure we will hear more from Laura’s  ‘Celestial’ explorations into smart textiles and clothing in the years ahead.

IFAI, the largest trade show in the Americas devoted to technical and specialty fabrics opens the doors between Sept. 23 – 25 in San Diego, CA. Organized as a pre-IFAI event, the Smart eTextile Solutions is taking place on Sept. 22, from 8:30am – 6:30pm

Like in the past few years, IFAI continuous to support the eTextile and Smart Fabrics business by inviting an interesting mix of professionals in the smart textile arena to share their expertise and experience in this field.

The speaker list includes:

• World Trends & Innovations in Smart Textiles by Isa Hoffmann, CEO, IHOFFMANN International
• Multifunctional Woven Cloth for Fuel Cell Gas Diffusion Media by Michael Ellis, Associate Professor, Virginia Tech
• Methods for Fabricating Broadloom Mesh Networks and Allowing Electrical Connections to be Formed Across Discontinuities by Jeremiah Slade, Business Area Manager, InfoSciTex
• Connectors in Flexible Fabrics to Reduce Load Requirements for Soldiers by Eric Gans, Director, Systems Engineering, Physical Optics Corp.
• LilyPad Arduino: A Kit for Prototyping Electronic Textiles by Leah Buechley, Assistant Professor, MIT Media Lab
• Smart Textiles as a Component in a System by Michael Corbett, Owner and General Manager, WEEL Technologies
• Design Innovation and the Development of a Material Culture: fashion, tools, tradition and experimentation by Despina Papadopoulos, Design Director, Studio 5050
• Commercializing a Smart Fabric Sensor – Applications and Lessons by Brian Russell, CEO, Zephyr Technology Limited
• E-textile – State of the Market by Qaizar Hassonjee, VP Development & Commercialization, Adidas Wearable Sports Electronics – Textronics

A long and impressive list of eTextile experts covering the whole chain form research, manufacturing and business development to DIY wearable electronic around the LilPad.

If you are in the area or you can manage to go to San Diego on Sept 22 you can expect a highly charged discussion around eTextiles.

The hard work of the team organizing the Smart Textiles Salon, trying to get the best of the best to offer in the smart textiles arena, has finalized and released the agenda for this event which will be held later this month (Sept 22) in Ghent, a jointed European workshop organized by the European projects SysTex and Proetex.

The workshop will start at 9:00am with SHHH…, Amplifying Textiles and continues with Bio-sensing textiles for health care, Smart Sweat-Band, How-to-get-what-you-want from Mika Satomi, Klight the interactive dress, Conductive textile platforms, Protex Firefighter Uniform, Stretchable and washable electronics, Illuminative Sonic Top … just to name a few and of course, there are coffee breaks planned as well.

Highly charged with top presenter and experts, this agenda is a guaranty to keep you focused the whole day.

You can download the final agenda with all details via this link (PDF document!)

SysTex, a European project within the Seventh Framework program for research and technological development in the field of e-textiles and wearable electronics in Europe is organizing the SYSTEX STUDENT AWARD.

Eligible for the SYSTEX STUDENT AWARD are thesis’ or projects at European universities, research institutes and companies. The award will be given to the student at the Smart Textiles Salon on September 25th in Ghent.

The Student of the winning project or thesis will be invited to the Smart Textiles Salon to present his/her project. Registrations fee, travel and accommodation costs as well as the non-monetary prize will be paid by SysTex.

Sounds like a great opportunity to show your great work to the public and have a nice trip to Ghent – free of charge.

The submission deadline is August 31 using the standard application procedure through the university, research institute or company. The submission should be in form of 4 pages, English language, supporting media files are welcome.

Please contact either Lina Rambausek (Lina.Rambausek@UGent.be) or Francois Narbonneau (Narbonneau@multitel.be) or visit the SysTex Website for more information.