Wearable technology moves from the wrist to smarter high fashion
Originally posted in news.com.au by Rod Chester
WEARABLE technology is no longer just about devices you strap to your wrist.
Increasingly, it’s about smart garments designed to analyse your health or help you navigate foreign cities or boost your personal relationships.
Gartner predicts 26 million smart garments will ship by next year, with the market exploding since the 0.01 million shipments of 2013.
Intel has demonstrated wearable clothes to monitor babies while they sleep. Ralph Lauren unveiled its Polo Tech show at last year’s US Open tennis. Professional athletes are regularly wearing clothing fitted with performance assessing sensors.
In what perhaps is the biggest sign of the convergence, Apple is sponsoring the 2016 Met Gala, the fashion industry’s biggest party of the year, with the theme “fashion in the age of technology”.
Billie Whitehouse is the smart-garment evangelist who runs the New York-based Wearable Experiments that has released three smart garments in the past few years.
Its Fundawear is a cheeky underwear range that let you use an app to send a digital “touch” to your partner’s undies.
Its Navigate jacket directs you to a location by tapping you on either your left or right shoulder when it’s time to turn.
Alert Shirt is a fan jersey that delivers a range of senses to the fan in real-time based on the actions during a game.
Whitehouse is currently working on a consumer fashion line and consulting with Brisbane-based SMG Technologies on expanding their focus analysing athletes’ performance data and developing consumer products.
Whitehouse says we are further down the path of wearable technology than many realise, with the fashion industry following the lead of health and fitness.
“This idea of ‘wearable technology’ as a title will fall away and it will just become ready to wear,” Whitehouse says.
“I despise the title myself because it’s really limiting and people think of it as this thing that either sits on your wrist of that flashes.
“I don’t want to build either of those. I want to build things that actually enhance an experience or changes an experience and is really designed for all five senses.
“We’re getting away from this idea of being stuck in a bucket of a wearable technology piece which it has been to date and we’re really moving into a far more bigger platform where it’s now just ready-to-wear.”
Wearable technology is not the only industry term Whitehouse dislikes. She also has a beef with the Internet of Things: the term to describe a future of all things being smart and connected.
“When you talk about IoT, I think that’s a term that consumers don’t really get,” she says.
“I talk about the empathetic home. What are the technologies that affect my emotions and give me this empathy for how my home works, and my home having empathy towards me.”
Many smart garments available now contain sensors that measure physical performance, like the Athos compression sports range that give real-time feedback on how individual muscles perform.
Going forward, they will increasingly have haptic sensors that give feedback, similar to the way the Apple Watch taps your wrist with notifications.
“I was cheering when Apple told everybody when they were having haptic feedback as a feature,” Whitehouse says.
“Your body is this instrument. We’ve been so dominated by screens for so long, this is a way of life beyond the screen.
“It’s going to go much, much further than that and we will have these subtle communications all around the body.”
