Why isn’t real life like this? Ever since the gung-ho 1990s, technology visionaries have been predicting the day when electronics built into the clothes on our backs and the fabrics in our furniture would act as invisible servants, linking us to the myriad smart machines that would comprise the modern home. Called e-textiles, the idea was ultimately to incorporate the full range of technology into the fabric, so the wearer was not just connected but electronically self-sufficient. Scientists labored mightily to deliver laptops up the sleeves and TVs in the trousers; they devised head-mounted video cameras and cotton keyboards sewn into chinos (they looked cool enough, but even the slightest tear rendered the circuits useless). Efforts to wire wearers to the Internet proved equally fruitless: who wants a modem bulging in the pocket of your pinstripe suit? What these gurus of engineering didn’t reckon on was fashion. What’s been needed, says Maggie Orth of International Fashion Machines (IFM), an MIT start-up in Boston, is “a whole new approach.”
The worlds of fashion and technology now seem to be converging on one man. Sundaresan Jayaraman, an engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Textile and Fiber Engineering, is not a particularly flashy dresser, but he may have hit on just the thing to make high-tech clothing hip. Five years ago Jayaraman invented a way of making a kind of electronic fabric–a supple mixture of natural fibers and gossamer-thin wires and optical fibers. He’s been tinkering with it ever since, and now it’s almost ready for prime time. Later this year Sensatex, a start-up based in New York, plans to market the SmartShirt, made of Jayaraman’s fabric, for medical applications, like monitoring a body’s vital signs. Jayaraman hopes it will quickly make its way into the consumer realm. A bevy of inventors, inspired by Jayaraman’s experimental fabric, have sprung up in recent years and followed his vision: less technology means more efficiency.
Just don’t call Jayaraman’s invention an e-textile. “E-textiles are so passive and passe,” he says. The future, he says, belongs to i-textiles–“i” for interactive. Jayaraman wants his computerized clothes to communicate with other separately wired apparel to form a more efficient network. The theory is that each fabric shouldn’t try to be all things to all people; rather, it should work like a personal computer’s motherboard–a printed circuit board that contains only those things fundamental to the machine’s operation, such as the power supply, the central processing unit and a bit of memory.
Jayaraman’s fabric is, he says, a kind of wearable motherboard. An i-textile does absolutely nothing until various electrical doodads are clipped on. You might put a microphone on your lapel and a tape recorder in your pocket, attach headphones and an MP3 player to your hat, or clip a blood-pressure monitor to your chest. Electrical and optical signals operate the devices by zipping through the fabric. The possibilities are limited only by the amount of memory and the weight of the gadgets hanging from your sleeves.
The first applications of Jayaraman’s technology will be medical. Sensatex’s much-heralded Smart-Shirt will pick up signals from the wearer’s body–body temperature, blood flow–and transmit them to a computer elsewhere in the vicinity (in the car, say, or in the living room). If the readings indicate you’re having a heart attack, the shirt could have the –computer call 911 or your doctor. Jayaraman can easily add or remove the shirt’s sensors, as need be. That makes washing a lot easier, and reduces wear and tear. The shirt could eventually be used for a wide range of medical monitoring applications, such as to detect sudden infant death syndrome, monitor a diabetic’s insulin level (and, provided proper fault testing were performed, even inject the user with required dosages) or gauge the extent of a soldier’s wounds. Jayaraman soon plans to seek FDA approval for monitoring heartbeat and respiration with his gizmo.
The technology’s toughest test will come from the consumer market, where the rule of fashion is unforgiving. “The user shouldn’t know when he’s wearing an electronic textile,” says Jayaraman, and the wearer shouldn’t have to be a “rocket scientist” to use it. To achieve such blissful invisibility, each garment will at first handle only a few functions. The shirt might monitor body heat and blood flow, and a wrist band may serve as the front-door key. One shoe might have an interface to the burglar alarm, while the other senses the wearer’s weight. Any complicated interactions among the individual sensors would be coordinated by an external computer somewhere in the room, rather than a PC in the trousers pocket.
If that proves a success, other medical innovations are expected to follow quickly, while the military works on its own applications for the “soldier of the future,” most of which are currently being developed at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass. (These include uniforms wired with data-transmitting equipment that could lighten the load the average foot soldier has to lug into battle.) And surely, if perhaps slowly, electronics will seep into our everyday surroundings. If Jayaraman’s technology works, there’d be no discernible difference between an i-textile and a conventional one. So why not wire every item of clothing? Why not wire the fabric used in furniture, drapes and carpets as well?
The e-textile industry is starting to take note of this i-textile approach, even if it hasn’t yet adopted the name. IFM’s Orth wants to do “realistic things” with electronic textiles. She recently produced a decorative fabric woven with heating electrodes and thermochromic ink, which changes from black to pink and back to black again according to the room’s temperature. It can hang on the wall or be used to cover the couch. Infineon Technologies in Germany is producing a jacket with an MP3 player sewn into it. Earlier this year Burton Snowboards and Apple Computer released a coat with an embedded iPod, Apple’s portable digital music player. New York’s 5050 Ltd. and London’s Knowledge Lab have developed the mbracelet, a wrist accessory capable of withdrawing money from prototype cash machines. “The mbracelet is futuristic,” admits –Despina Papadopoulos, 5050’s founder. “But at the same time, it’s realistic.”
Most tech-textile designers believe it is now only a matter of time before we actually live among what Diana Marculescu, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, calls “intelligent ambient systems.” The more conservative forecasts put sales of wired clothing at $100 million by 2006; others think the market could be worth $1 billion by then, which would make electronic textiles a craze on the order of mobile phones in the past few years.
Even before wearables take off, the puzzle pieces seem to be falling in place. Already the alarm-activating shirt, the light-switching shoe sole and the remote-control couch are technologically feasible. In a few years, high-school basketball coaches may have their kids wear i-textile shirts to monitor their vitals; a wrist-embedded bar code to open one’s door is only one step removed from the mbracelet. With improvements in flexible batteries from companies like ITN Energy Systems in Colorado, all these devices should also be far more reliable.
Even though wearable electronics have been over-hyped in the past, experts are confident that everything is now coming together–for real this time. So now, the question is no longer if one day we’ll all be wearing wired wingtips. It’s how soon that will be–and whether I’ll still be listening to Shakira.
