The Touch Glove created by Ally Seeley is not only a cool eTextile design concept, it does address a rare but occurring problem effecting unfortunate people who loose their tactile feel.

Feeling with the fingers is a essential part of our life. Most of the time we are not even aware how much we rely on our tactile sensing capability. We touch many things we see to aid and confirm our visual impression of an object.

Fire accidents can lead to a prolonged, temporary or even permanent loss of the tactile feel sense. Damaged nerves responsible for tactile feel is another cause for loosing this vital sense.

Ally replaces the loss of tactile feel in fingers with a smart glove, giving a visual feedback of the surfaces touched with the Touch Glove. A textile pressure sensor is integrated in the index finger which picks up the softness / hardness and structure of the surface. The differences in pressure on the sensor is translated into different light pattern emitted by the LEDs embedded at the wrist of the glove.

If you are interested in building your own Touch Glove you can either click over to Ally’s Instructables or take the opportunity and meet Ally in person at the upcoming eTextile Lounge at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 where Ally is hosting one the the eTextile Workshops using her Touch Glove as example how to get started with eTextile Crafting.

Wearable Power, the all time favorite of the wearable technology community, keeps on inspiring people to find ways of making use of the many Watt’s a human body produces at any time of the day.

Estimates go as high as about 130 Watt’s potentially usable to transform from kinetic energy into electrical energy. The highest kinetic power sources on a human body are the footfalls clocking in about 67W followed by arm motion at about 60W. At the end of the scale is lifting a finger that generates only about 10mW.

While searching about parasitic power harvesting from body motion I cam across an interesting concept design from Nick Reddall, the HuMo or Human Dynamo Jacket.

The HuMo jacket proposes to harvest kinetic energy generated from the natural arm swings of the wearer when wandering through the world and transforming the kinetic energy into electrical energy to light up LEDs providing enhanced visibility for the wearer or just for style or fun purpose.

Transforming the theoretical power generated by body movement efficiently without interfering with the wear comfort of clothing  remains a challenge. Most experiments around parasitic power harvesting from the human body either result in low electrical power conversion due to wearability concerns or effect negatively the wear comfort when higher power conversion is achieved.

For now – there is still a lot of room for innovation to solve the dilemma of the kinetic power conversation ratio vs. wear comfort.

Sabine Seymour, Chief Creative Officer of her company Moondial, Assistant Professor of Fashionable Technology and the director of Fashionable Technology Lab at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and author of two inspiring books, ‘Fashionable Technology: The Intersection of Design, Fashion, Science and Technology’ and ‘Functional Aesthetics: Visions in Fashionable Technology’, has released the Fashionable Technology Report Spring 2012 edition.

Titled ‘The Super Human’ this first edition of a bi-yearly series of reports focuses on the  desire to create a super human through advances in technology using product examples such as Zeal Optics’ iON camera Goggles or Under Armours’ E39 performance tracking shirt. Included in the report are timelines of products by consumer brands Adidas and Nike and information about OEMs like Clothing+.

The ‘Fashionable Technology Report’ is not the conventional report of data tables but merges the visuals of a trend report with data of a business report. It presents the intersection between design, fashion, science and technology from the perspective of a specialist, featuring upcoming trends, products, business data, and company profiles.

You can download the ‘Super Human Fashionable Technology Report‘ at the Moondial online shop. As special bonus for talk2myShirt readers: use the promo code: talk2 and save $150.-

Sabine Seymour is one of the pioneers in wearable, fashionable technology a term she coined in her first book Fashionable Technologypublished in 2008. She is member of countless boards in the world of wearable technology, placing her in a perfect position to give up-to-date views and outlook on wearable tech’s future perspectives.

A team at Studio NMinusOne at the University of Toronto’s RAD (Responsive Architecture at Daniels) developed an amazing smart textile object, the IM Blanky a blanket that knows its state in time and position in space.

Being able to know ones position in time and space represents one of the most primitive forms of cognition, the awareness of one’s own body. The IM Blanky comes very close to being aware of its ‘self’, making it a truly smart textile.

Using traditional embroidery techniques and figurative designs typical for embroidery like animal, floral or other natural motives, the creators show a deep understanding to integrate ‘naturally’ electronics into textiles, making the electronic components and function a part of the design and not an add-on. A very thoughtful design concept I always appreciate.

At the center of the sensory blanket ability is a tilt sensor made in the shape of a flower of the overall floral design using the flower trunks to connect the flower sensors with conductive thread to form the cognitive network.

Measuring 7’7” x 4’2” the IM Blanky contains 104 tilt sensors arranged into clusters. Each flower tilt sensor consists of 6 conductive petals linked by resistors and a conductive tassel in the center. Each petal reports a different resistance value, giving the N,S,W,E orientation in space and time.

The flower sensors are arranged into 14 clusters and two half clusters linked together to form a network, each relaying the directional position of the tilt sensor to a LilyPad processor unit stitched into the backside of the blanket.

Mapping the position data received by the tilt sensors, the software running on the LilyPad reconstructs a slope for each sensor based on the position of that cell and its immediate neighbors, generating essentially a surface of peaks and valleys in real time.

A pretty smart piece of textile, highly creative and innovative design of this network representing a artificial cognitive awareness system in textile form. Impressive the relatively simplistic materials involved to form the sensor.

Team members Rodolphe el-Khoury, Christos Marcopoulos, Carol Moukheiber, with Valentina Mele, Sebastian Savone, Yie Ping See, Jonah Ross Marrs, Samar Sabie and Dina Sabie, created an amazing smart textile object that opens the inspirational doors to further experimentation and to explore possible usage of self-aware textiles for commercial applications.

[source: Domus via Ubergizmo]

It is always fascinating to see Amy Winter’s new collection of color shifting designs. The third year in a row, Amy has been hard working to come up with a new fiber technology to create amazing color changes of her fashion pieces not by battery power but by the dynamic movement of the body.

A collaboration between Amy and researchers at the NanoPhotonics Centre at the Cavendish laboratories (University of Cambridge) resulted in a new type of  fabric, the ‘Polymer Opal’ Lycra. The rubber-like properties of the fibers result in color changes when bended, stretched or twisted.

Using ‘Structural Color’ as focus point for her showcase styles of the A/W 12-13 collection under the label Rainbow Winters, pieces like the Liquid Bodysuit, Liquid Leggings or Liquid Armband demonstrate the amazing properties of the Polymer Opal’ Lycra.

‘Structural Color’ is a type of color generated through diffraction exhibiting a metallic look even though it usually contains no metal. Structural colors can be found in tropical fish, in the wings of tropical butterflies, beetle wings, oil slicks and soap bubbles.

Amy Winters skillfully fuses Science with Fashion. Remarkably, all of her textile innovations do not require electrical energy, maybe not strictly speaking belong to wearable electronic, but the effects are the same.

A magical shift of color shades dynamically activated by body movement or light or water as in her previous collections, creating an active color change that requires a wearer’s action to ignite a rainbow of colors flowing over the garment.

eTextiles and wearable tech truly inspire people around the globe, innovator and creator of amazingly sensible solutions.

Designer, developer and entrepreneur Tobias Sonne designed the Posture Suspenders to solve a problem most of the notebook and iPad swinging folks are confronted with on a daily basis: slouching behind a keyboard, maltreating the spine and muscles which leads most certain to long-term back pain, headache and more.

Apparently 50% of all working Americans suffer from back pain symptoms each year costing an accumulated $50 billion. The prime suspect for all this pain: slouching, hanging around over prolonged time in a bad posture. As Tobias points out, there are products in the market that promise to help keeping a healthy posture but most of them are very cumbersome to use.

Tobias’ Posture Suspender, a working prototype study he developed at The CoDe Lab, Carnegie Mellon University, uses stripes of conductive stretch fabric attached to a normal pair of suspenders. Any stretch of the suspender will stretch the conductive fabric which in turn changes it’s electrical resistance. This resistance change can be used for all sorts of alerts to the wearer to resume a more healthier posture.

The Posture Suspender prototype uses a vibration motor for the posture alert. The resistance change is send to an Arduino Pro Mini board duct away in the suspenders.

For demonstration purpose Tobias integrated a wireless XeBee link to a PC to visualize the slouching defamation of the wearer.

Yeah I hear you already – I do not like to wear suspenders. My neither but looking through Tobia’s ‘the making off’ photo documentation it should be easy to use a base-layer or undershirt fitted with a smart posture sensor.

We have seen a number of wearable tech enhanced gloves supporting the communication between deaf persons and persons who do not understand well the sign language. Such gloves contain sensors which detect gestures and translate this signals into speech.

Researchers Tom Bieling, Ulrike Gollner and Gesche Joost at the Design Research Lab in Berlin, Germany, added a new dimension to communication gloves capable to communicate with deaf-blind persons.

The glove is named after the tactile sign language Lorm, the ‘Mobile Lorm Glove‘. Lorm is a communication form with deaf-blind persons. It is similar to the sign language used to communicate with deaf people with the addition that a blind person receives the message created with finger signs on the back of his or her hand. Lorm is also called ‘hands-on signing’.

The Mobile Lorm Glove is fitted with textile pressure sensors located in the palm of the glove enabling the deaf-blind person to compose a message into his or her hand. This message is then transmitted to a handheld device via Bluetooth – could be a smart phone running an App – and forwarded to the other deaf-blind person.

The receiving message is then converted into tactile feedback pattern generated by small vibration motors located at the back of the glove.

A brilliant concept, based on the Lorm communication method for deaf-blind people and transfers it into our technological lifestyle. In the same way as the person-to-person communication works the Mobile Lorm Glove would be capable to enable deaf-blind people receiving emails or read eBooks. The text of emails or eBooks runs over a conversion and is transmitted to the glove’s tactile vibration sensor network.

[via Fashioning Technology]

 Safe@Sea is a European Union funded project looking for solutions to eliminate the high causality rate of fisherman at sea.

Fishing is among one of the most dangerous professions especially in bad weather on small boats. Far too often a man goes over board during the battle with the elements.

If that happens, a range of problems come up simultaneously: freezing cold water, a boat speeding away, calling for help. Locating a person in rough sea is almost mission impossible.

There is a range of devices on the market that cater for such emergencies, devices like GPS signal transmitter, a remote control that kills the engine of the boat, distress signal transmitter, flash lights and others.

The problem with all these pocket devices is: they have to be in the pocket all time as nobody anticipates such unfortunate accident. A forgotten GPS or motor-kill remote can end fatal.

This scenario served as starting point for the Safe@Sea project, to integrate some if not all essential emergency functions into a fisherman’s clothing without altering the function and wear comfort of the clothing.

Ideally, the smart fisherman clothing activates most of the emergency functions like giving heat, switching on the flashlight, stopping the boat’s engine or sending a distress signal without the need of the fisherman to think about and actively initiate these functions.

Going overboard unwanted puts a person in distress already – smart fisherman’s clothing could be a great life safer in such dire situations.

The Safe@Sea project will be presented this May at the 5th European conference on Protective Clothing in Valencia and the 10th International Conference on Occupational Risk Prevention in Bilbao both in Spain.

Work-wear, garments catering for the specific needs for various professions are to my opinion a prime market for wearable technology adoption.

Enhancing the safety and/or productivity of professionals is a huge incentive to embrace any idea, any design that serves these to factors.

Life is priceless and higher productivity always justifies investment. Wearable technologies do add primarily functions to clothing; light, sensory, monitoring or alerting, all this inside and within an object that we use like a second skin – our clothing.

The increased focus of research and development into wearable technology is increasingly attracting the interest of established companies and organizations in the protective clothing market.

The upcoming 5th European conference on Protective Clothing carries the title ‘Future of Protective Clothing: Intelligent or not‘ indicating the high interest and expectations on smart, wearable technology.

The symposium serves as a forum for the exchange and discussion of results from research, development and implementation related to personal protective clothing.

This conference, taking place between 29th and 31st May in Valencia, Spain is intended for researchers, designers, manufacturers, purchasers, product safety experts, human factors experts and public authorities as well as end-users, health and safety experts.

CuteCircuit established itself firmly in the illuminated fashion domain pushing constantly the technological boundaries far out into the future.

Founded by Francesca Rosella and Ryan Genz, CuteCircuit moved from the early days of the Hug Shirt to textile illumination, creating stage-wear for some of the big names in show-biz.

Their latest boundary pushing stage-wear outfit is a 4.5 meter silk chiffon skirt that incorporates thousands of LEDs embroidered onto the fabric.

To enhance the magical light radiation of the LEDs, the silk chiffon is decorated with Swarovski crystals creating an breath taking color shift, cycling through gradient’s of grey ranging from moonlight to diamond.

Anyone who ever made LED light elements in fabrics will be impressed by the amount of work going into the creation of such garment with hundreds and thousands of the little light points attached to the textile – not to speak about the challenge to make sure all the LEDs play nicely in sync to create colorful light waves flowing down the skirt.

Italian singer Laura Pausini is mesmerizing the audience during her Inedito World Tour 2011/2012 with this record breaking skirt.

Besides CutCircuit’s stage-wear design, Francesca and Ryan offer fantastically looking illuminated fashion for the consumer market. You can check out the Spring/Summer 2012 collection at the CuteCircuit online shop what this season will bring on illuminated, technology enhanced fashion for she and him.