ARTICLE: Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs

[Ryan Goble]

Two interesting articles I had archived about new WIRED clothing...

1. From sciencecentral.com 

Electronic fabric is showing up on museum walls and in art galleries. But you can’t start wearing it yet. As this ScienCentral News video reports, smart fashions will need nanotechnology, the science of making molecules do useful things, to be ready to wear.

Smart Outfits

Electronic textiles are fabrics that are wired to transfer information within a piece of clothing. Right now, you can buy jackets with disc players and controls sewn in—but designers envision e-wear that will heat or cool its wearer, monitor vital signs, and change color on command.

Maggie Orth is co-founder/CEO of International Fashion Machines, a small company in Cambridge, Massachusetts that develops and manufactures e-textiles for art works, interior designs like wall hangings and table cloths, as well as industrial and military uses. Orth trained as a designer at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then earned her Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, whose Wearable Computing Group came up with the concept of smart clothing about ten years ago.

Source can be found here.

2. From Jan 2008 Wired 

Ready to Ware: Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too 

I'm sitting in the offices of Smartex near Pisa, Italy, admiring a jogging bra into which a piezoelectric sensor has been woven. A muscular young man wearing a skin-tight gray tank suit walks in. Without a word, he sets up a laptop and begins jumping up and down. His heart rate pops up on the screen and climbs as his exertions become more vigorous.

Since we're in Italy, of course, the tank looks fabulous. But that isn't the point. Smartex, cofounded by biomedical engineer Danilo De Rossi, aims to create clothing that not only provides cover, warmth, and style but also keeps its wearers healthy.

"If I want to monitor a whole body," De Rossi says, "why not use clothes?"The "Wealthy" outfit (the name is a loose acronym for "wearable health care system") worn by the young man is the most developed of Smartex's recent designs. Powered by a tiny embedded lithium battery, it's a washable unitard that reads the wearer's vital signs and beams the data wirelessly to a computer. Information on posture and movement is measured by the stress on sensors built into the garment.

Read on here.