SmartFabrics Recap!

Another SmartFabrics conference, but with very few surprises this time. The talks I thought would be good were, and those that I had low expectations for weren't as great. What I didn't plan on was to see Robin Shephard (formerly of Eleksen) give as much insight as he did concerning the abrupt decline of Eleksen.

Certainly we'll be seeing case studies in future classes at business school -- but it would have been fun to have had the chance to see it in the "E-dreams" documentary context.

There also seemed to be a great deal of emphasis on the "wearable computing" aspect of SmartFabrics. While there's nothing wrong with that, it would have been nice to see more technology talks at the fiber/yarn/fabric level vs. just device integration.

Other notable talks included Crosslink's talk on electroluminescent fabrics for tents/shelters, Nyx Clothing's talk on power requirements and connector testing, and a view of the back-end processing and modeling of e-textiles from VA Tech's Tom Martin.

I understand that next year's conference will be in Rome, which makes it a tough sell to get the boss to pony up the cash for travel -- I guess we'll have to start working on it now.

SmartFabrics 2008

It's time again for SmartFabrics, this years conference will be held in Charleston, SC.

Given the location I'd expect heavy participation from Miliken, but I guess we'll see this week. Talks that I'm officially looking forward to:

• Torsten Linz's seminar on Integration Technologies for Electronics in Textiles


• Robin Shephard's take on Eleksen as a Success Story


• Winston Shih's North Face talk


• Stacey Burr's Textronics talk


• Fred DeAngelis's talk (I always expect a good talk from him)

As things happen at the conference I'll try to post -- otherwise expect a good recap...

Burough Check...

I'm re-engaging after a necessary absence (work-life overwhelming at the moment). As part of the ramping up process, I'm doing a "burough-check" of sorts to see who's doing what. I'm assuming that the usual suspects (NTC-types) are represented (check my research section), but what about the new faces and the foreign research entities (MIT-ISN, CSIRO, my UK brethren, etc.)? I am guessing we'll see at the NTC Forum in Greenville?

On the industry side, I am really looking forward to seeing what is new at SmartFabrics this May. I am not overly optimistic however, as I'm guessing the same people will be saying the same thing. Maybe I'll be wrong, but if history is any indication, I will be right...

Facebook!

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Meet other Facebook folk with an interest in our technology area and make the world a little smaller...

Power Scavenging 2.0

A few months ago (has it really been that long?) I posted the story about the Australians kicking off a new initiative for a power-scavenging shirt at CSIRO (that post can be found here). In that post a mentioned (and linked to) a group of guys who are working at the nanoscale to achieve the energy harvesting. And while it was certainly impressive, they were only able to scavenge at ultrasonic harmonics (not mechanical) -- well guess what? They've now developed a methodology to grow the scavenging nanowires on the surface or polymeric fibers and can harvest mechanical energy. The group's homepage can be found here, I would suggest reading through the previous papers first to get a sense of how they've progressed over the past few months.

They estimate that with this fibers integrated into a yarn, a square meter could yield roughly 80 mW -- granted this is assuming A LOT (the ability to make enough of this fiber affordably, the ability to make a yarn, and an interconnect scheme with low loss!) however it at least gives some vague parameters for developers on the other end to pull this through as it develops. Of course, the usual applications are mentioned: ipod shirt, biomedical applications, etc...but I feel like there are much cooler applications that can be explored, what do you think?

Surveillance Vest!

I love this post (saw it on gizmodo via Danger Room)-- it is the perfect snapshot of where we are in terms of technology for Interactive Textiles... (at least in the marketplace). May I present the surveillance vest!

Discrete electronic components with a honkin' big battery pack. I seem to recall someone at a SmartFabrics conference refer to this as the "textile as a container" methodology. I really think we can do better (flexible polymer-ion battery, fiber-optic mic, textile button interface -- ok, admittedly the camera is a bit harder). But in terms of its actual application you might as well be wearing this:

The gizmodo posting is good, the comments are better. The company's website can be found here. It is obvious that their strong-suit lies in the back-end and infrastructure rather than the sensors and packaging -- but if the iphone and ipod has taught us anything it is that design and packaging equal adoption.

I've also read a good blog on why the spider-suit idea is dead in the water...I'll address that in the coming days...

Fashion and Interactive Textiles

To be cool is to be fashionable. It seems that these days technology and fashion are starting to merge -- see Angel Chang and Elena Corchero. And while certainly not mainstream yet, you can see trends developing out of niches. But we don't typically talk fashion here, other people do that much better than we do (see talk2myshirt.com or this blog entry) -- in fact I've taken my own jabs at it from time to time.

But I will say this, these types of efforts do push people to think in different ways about technology and how they interact with it. The fuel for most of these efforts is of course the emergence of the cell phone and the ipod -- all of a sudden there are technologies that people want with them at all times...since we have our clothes with us at all times (mostly), it seems like a great fit. But I don't think we're quite there yet (at least on the technology side). We have yet to get away from bulky processing and power (although Nantero and Konarka are making headway). We need textiles to "enhance" the technology, not hold it -- we can buy an elastic band for that or simply use a pocket. It's expensive to integrate the technology and thus its only available in high end items that can absorb the cost -- and with Eleksen's hiccup we may have seen that the business model isn't proving out for that route either.

So who do we look to? Who still researches this stuff? Check out these efforts in the US, and these companies/universities in Europe...