Skip to main content

Cityzen smart shirt tracks your health, recharges during washing

Rightly or wrongly, the French are known for clothing designs that are often less than practical. Now, however, French company Cityzen Sciences has won the CES 2014 Inclusive Innovation in Everyday Health award for its development of a Smart Sensing fabric woven with integral micro-sensors – these add the practical benefit of monitoring the health and fatigue levels of the wearer.
The Smart Sensing fabric reads body heat, respiration rate, heart rate, and motion through location via GPS. "The fabric can be made into any clothing; gloves, shirts, pants, you name it," said Gilbert Reveillon, Cityzen's international managing director.
The new smart fabric combines sensors, fabric, distributed computation, and a small battery-powered transmitter into a unit that links in real time to a smartphone. The phone runs an app that stores and analyzes data from the fabric, showing if the person wearing the garment is tired, stressed, or in the path of an imminent heart attack. Obvious applications are for people who find themselves in extreme conditions, such as athletes, first responders, and soldiers.
Smart Sensing fabric, which costs perhaps 30 to 40 percent more than ordinary material, can be safely laundered and ironed. Additional sensors can be added to the fabric, as compatible versions are developed. Such information as blood oxygen, tidal volume (the amount of air flowing in and out of the lungs when breathing normally), and perhaps eventually blood glucose levels could make such fabrics vital systems in monitoring people's day-to-day health.
Perhaps the cleverest part of Smart Sensing fabric is still under development. Cityzen is working on a recharging system for the fabric, that receives most of its energy when the clothing is washed. This is a perfect use for a motion-driven recharging system – can you think of a better environment for collecting mechanical energy than a washing machine?
Smart Sensing fabric is expected to reach the commercial market later this year. More information is available in the video below.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 URLs to Find Out What Google Knows About You

Google is much more than just a search giant. It is also home to many of your favorite products: Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome, just to name a few. Apart from that, it also offers many products to help you  keep track of your data . Most of these are  hidden deep  inside the My Account dashboard, which many users don’t really know of. These hidden tools  may reveal interesting details  about your usage of Google’s many services. We’ve compiled a list of important Google URLs of some  hidden tools  that carry information of what you did with Google, mostly from the searches that you have made on their many products, the voice searches and typed out Google searches that you have made. Are you ready to  find out what how Google knows about you ? 1.  Google Dashboard Google Dashboard offers  transparency and control over the personal data stored with your Google Account. You can  view  and  manage the data gener...

Edible water balloons that could get rid of the need for plastic bottles

In case you didn’t know, bottled water is destroying the planet. We know that we need to be drinking plenty of water. It’s important. But the plastic bottles they’re sold in are terrible for the environment. One solution is using reusable bottles that you can fill from any nearby taps instead of buying a new bottle each time. Another solution is much more exciting. A group of engineers from Skipping Rocks Lab have developed a wonderful thing called The Ooho!. It’s a globe filled water that you can pop in your mouth whole. The outer shell is made of algae, so it’s edible and biodegradable. Meaning there’s no need for packaging or plastic – the globes of water are self-contained and ready to consume. Exciting, right? Plus they’re wobbly and they look cool, which is always a bonus. The team have now created a crowdfunding page to make their creation available to the public, with goals of selling The Ooho! at festival and marathons within the next 12 m...

Casio PicapiCamera iPhone app is the world's first to use visible light communication technology

PicapiCamera, developed by Casio, is the world's first iPhone app which uses visible light communication technology. To send and receive data via the app, the message to be sent is encoded using red, green and blue flashing lights and shown on the display. The receiver points their iPhone at the flashing lights and the data is transferred. "There are two approaches to communication using visible light. One is to embed data in the light from illumination sources, by turning it on and off at high speed, as a natural way of communicating information. With that approach, devices use photodiodes. The other approach involves image sensors. A device that captures light is a camera, so the idea is to relate light obtained by a camera to information. We're using the camera approach - visible light communication through image sensors." "When exchanging addresses, this system can send addresses to up to five people, rather than just one-to-one." "If yo...