Snug shirts, tailored coats and jackets with controllers for media players, sunglasses that serve as a media player or cell phone, bras and sport shirts that measure one's heart pulse, fabrics that broadcast ECG data and shoes that transmit running data to the iPod. No, we are not taking a peek into the fashion of the future, but rather the first trickles of a new and pioneering technological fashion trend of smart clothes, interactive woven materials and computers you can wear – a field that is now making its way from the drawing board to the store shelves.

"Within five years, most of the gadgets will be wearable. They will be part of the clothes we wear and will also be linked to the Internet, while we receive the energy for operating all of this computerization from a personal windmill in our hat, from batteries printed on paper or via solar panels on our backpack," says Dr. Eyal Sheffer, a lecturer in textile engineering and computers at Shenkar, who also spoke on this subject at the annual conference of the Israel Internet Association. He said that the world is striding toward technologies like WiMax that will enable us and our wearable gadgets to be constantly linked to the Internet.

So what, in fact, is computerized clothing? The smart and interactive cloth is produced by weaving conductive materials into the cloth, making them into a type of electrical conductor that can respond to touch or transfer electronic signals. Wearable computerization, which entails the interaction of technology within items of clothing, began as a military concept, where development costs, aesthetic design and comfort are less significant. Due to operational needs, armies and organizations like NASA became fertile ground for technological inventions that were eventually adapted for civilian use with enhanced design and efficiency.

A keyboard is a cruel invention

According to Sheffer, computerized clothing integrates technologies that enable us to perform activity without interruption, without having to use our hands or deal with technology. Clothing is the natural carrier of technology because we wear it on our bodies, it is attached to us, it can measure what our bodies are generating or emitting. Already today clothing can change its level of insulation and characteristics in order to protect us from cold or heat, and even change colors. Already today, he says, Nike have clothes with shutters like fish scales that open and close according to the body's level of perspiration. In the future, clothing will be able to change its characteristics upon command and become even more functional. If clothing is intended to empower the person who wears it and to provide added value, then in a world that reveres technology there is nothing more cool than to wear technology.

Bluetooth earphones, Sheffer explains, are the first stage in the technology of wearable computerization because they enable us to speak on a cell phone without holding the device. The cellular device itself is a development in the direction of portable computerization, but only a partial one because when receiving visual information, for example, the user must stop what he is doing in order to look at the screen.

Today the keyboards embedded in a growing number of smart cell phones are especially irksome to Sheffer, as are the cellular PDAs. The QWERTY keyboard, Sheffer argues, is a obtuse and cruel invention, a legacy of the typewriter whose layout was originally intended to slow the pace of human typing so that the levers would not get stuck in one another. Already today, he says, there is voice recognition software and the field will just continue to develop.

Within years, Sheffer predicts, the keyboard will become a secondary accessory. And what will replace it? Soft keyboards, switches embedded in fabrics, RFID technologies or reality augmented eyeglasses that transmit information that is only visible to the person wearing them while enabling a viewing experience similar to a 50-inch screen. The day is not long off, Sheffer says, when personal GPS information will be transmitted directly to the spectacles. Physicians will be able to receive X-rays or any other information about a patient via these spectacles and students will receive learning material in exactly the same way as pilots receive information via their helmet visor.

Soon at Shenkar

The accelerated penetration of wearable technology into our lives is reflected, for example, in the fact that a course on computerized clothing, the first course of its type, will already be offered at the Shenkar College of Engineering & Design during the next academic year. But the academic study in this field is only the tip of the iceberg of extensive development activity in recent years by hundreds and thousands of companies in Israel and abroad. These companies are working on developing wearable technology applications for three main fields: medicine, work and leisure.

In the medical field, the European Union is financing a project called MyHeart to develop smart fabric and clothes that are capable of warning of initial signs of heart disease. In the framework of this project, Philips Design developed a fabric that measures ECG data and transfers it to a palm computer. There are already watches in the market that monitor various cardiological parameters and know which data to transmit, and when, to medical services companies like Shahal.

In another European project aimed at increasing work efficiency, which involves the Airbus aircraft manufacturer, it was discovered that most of the time wasted by airplane technicians was due to the long walk within the hangars between the work station and testing station. A new development project seeking to improve the efficiency of the technicians' work is focusing on developing augmented reality, spectacles that display all of the relevant data to the technicians on the visor and will save them the unnecessary walking.

Dr. Sheffer expects most of the development, and most of the money, to ultimately be channeled toward the third field of wearable technology – the field of leisure and entertainment. Think, for example, about the concept of matchmaking between singles who broadcast information to each other in RFID, or of conferences in which name tags can help to identify people with common interests.

Meanwhile, the most popular development in the field is the integration of controllers in electronic products for use as digital players. There are already products in the market that are no less interesting, such as sports undershirts that measure the user's pulse and transfer the data to a watch that enables runners to monitor their heart activity during physical training, or "hug shirts" from the British company CuteCircuit that hit the shelves last year, which measure user data such as temperature, pulse and blood pressure, and transmit the information via cell phone to another shirt that simulates the "hug" on another wearer, even on the other side of the world.

 

From Globes Magazine, Orit Zerubavel

For further details, please contact Dr. Eyal Sheffer, e-mail: eyals@mail.shenkar.ac.il