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Fashioning Tech

for fashion futurists & wearable tech enthusiasts

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      Aerochromics: Pollution Monitoring Garments Aim to Become A Sixth Skin

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      ‎BODYSONG‬./Glitchaus GLITCHJK Jacquard Bomber Jacket

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      December 11, 2015

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      Bring A Little Bling To Your Workout with Misfit’s Solar-Powered Activity Trackers Made From Swarovski Crystals

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      Wearables in Contemporary Ballet

      November 18, 2014

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      Fibers Software Transforms Your Fuelband Data into Art

      August 19, 2014

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      Adidas Reissues Micropacer OG

      August 14, 2014

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      Fashionable therapy brightens winter SADness

      July 30, 2015

      Healthcare

      Lightwear: An Exploration in Wearable Light Therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder

      February 4, 2015

      Healthcare

      Vigour — A Gorgeous Wearable For Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy

      December 18, 2014

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      Space: What to wear?

      June 7, 2014

      Healthcare

      E-textile Pillow for Communication Between Dementia Patients and Family

      November 5, 2013

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      Moff: Wearable Smart Toy For Kids

      August 21, 2014

      Wearables UX

      Temporary NFC Tattoo

      July 29, 2014

      Wearables UX

      Wearable Tech Guide to SXSW

      March 7, 2014

      Wearables UX

      PixMob’s LED beanies light up the SuperBowl by turning the crowd into human pixels

      February 3, 2014

      Wearables UX

      Cadbury Joy Jackets

      January 16, 2014

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      Interview with Davide Vigano of Heapsylon

      April 30, 2014

      Interviews

      Make It Wearable Video Series by Creators Project

      April 3, 2014

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      Interview with Sparkfun’s Dia Campbell

      March 26, 2014

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      Interview with Julia Koerner

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      Interview with Akseli Reho from Clothing Plus

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      Conductive Tattoos Turn Your Skin Into An Interface

      August 24, 2016

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      Biofabrication: The New Revolution in Material Design

      August 23, 2016

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      Aerochromics: Pollution Monitoring Garments Aim to Become A Sixth Skin

      August 17, 2016

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      Biomimicry and Sports Apparel

      August 15, 2016

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      Smart Fabrics Conference May 11 – 13

      April 27, 2015

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      Techno Textiles – Concordia University

      January 18, 2016

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      Smart Fabrics + Wearable Technology 2015 Review

      July 8, 2015

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      Explore and Learn from the Students of the Wearables Class at CCA

      April 19, 2015

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      Make It Wearable Winners

      November 4, 2014

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      JPG Data Knit Blanket Series from Glitchaus

      September 22, 2014

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Healthcare

Healthcare

Fashionable therapy brightens winter SADness

written by FashioningTech Contributor
What if you could brighten your day with the push of a button? And if that shine came from your clothes? Your hat? Or even your glasses? From Google Glass and Recon’s heads-up display to FitBit and the Apple Watch, technology that you wear is no longer a thing of science fiction. 

There’s so much wearable technology out there, “why not use it to treat something?” asks Halley Profita, a PhD. student in the Correll Robotics and the Kane Superhuman Computing labs in the Computer Science department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Could she use wearable tech to help people feeling the drag of winter blues?

In collaboration with Microsoft scientists Asta Roseway and Mary Czerwinski during a summer internship, Halley designed several lines of light-emitting wearables using LEDs and fiber optics sewn into clothing. Her garments, known as Lightwear, are luminous (literally), fashion-conscious clothing that anyone affected by winter depression can use to brighten away those blue funk doldrums.

Confronting Winter Dreariness

The onset of winter means fewer hours of sunlight, particularly at higher latitudes. For many people, the shortage of sunlight lowers their energy. Grogginess, irritability and general listlessness are traits that characterize a mood disorder – seasonal affective disorder, also known by its fitting acronym, SAD.

Getting more sunlight is the typical treatment for SAD. Jet setting to a sunny locale for the duration of the winter months would be great, but unfortunately isn’t a feasible option for most. Instead, people experiencing SAD often use a full spectrum light box. These light boxes are over-sized lamps that shine the full spectrum of visible light in all its blinding brilliance. The artificial sunlight tricks the brain into thinking it’s getting more sunlight. However, there are a few problems with this standard of care.

Imagine dragging yourself out of your warm, cozy bed, bracing yourself against the cold air, groggily fumbling through the dark to position yourself in a fixed posture with extremely bright lights shining at your eyes. Then convince yourself to remain in that position for 30 minutes to a full hour. Now, imagine you hit the snooze button one too many times. You’re running late. How motivated are you to use this light box? For most people with SAD, clinically diagnosed or not, the answer is: not very.

Almost half of surveyed light box users admitted to not using it because it’s so inconvenient. It’s hard to get ready for work in the morning when you have to sit still in front of the light, and even harder to get up earlier than you would otherwise have to just to use the light box.

“There’s a huge non-compliance rate, so in the end, one has to think, ‘What’s the point,’” Halley observes.

Blue Light Special
Current research indicates that blue light works best for people affected by SAD. This is great news for people with SAD because the blue light boxes are only 2-4% as bright as their full spectrum counterparts.

“We thought since blue light is effective at a lower intensity, can we put it on people so that the light therapy moves with them?” asked Halley.

In her designs, Halley only used lights that emit at this end of the spectrum. Because the blue light is not as bright, users aren’t blinded as they usually are with full-spectrum light therapy. She wanted to allow users to move around, get ready for work, and go about their day without being encumbered by the inconvenience of sitting still for an hour in front of a blinding light.

Lightwear: therapeutic tech brightens user enthusiasm
Through an online survey, Halley discovered that people with SAD were open to wearable therapy, like scarves and hats with blue light LEDs or fiber optics sewn into them. 

Halley emphasized making her garments fashionable as well as therapeutic. For example, the light from the wearables must strike the retina at a certain angle to deliver beneficial effects, but couldn’t be too close as to interfere with users’ vision.

She designed six prototypes: two scarves, two hats, a hood and a pair of eyeglasses — all items people wear during the winter. Halley tested these prototypes on volunteers. Feedback from this preliminary study was positive with one resonating theme. Though participants could envision wearing the garments, they still worried: “But, do I look good?”

Many users thought so, with one participant commenting that she liked the fact that her need for light treatment gave her an ‘excuse to wear a fashion-forward item that she typically wouldn’t wear otherwise’.

Lightwear can encourage people struggling with SAD to embrace rather than shun their illness. Based on Halley’s work, the clothes are cool and people with SAD enjoy the fact that their therapy moves with them.

Plus, Lightwear enables people to feel good about themselves despite struggling with winter depression. Now the question is whether the clothes are as effective against the winter blues as conventional light boxes.

————-

Halley acknowledges that in an era of STEM research, art remains significant. Innovation requires creativity, and design is a part of that.

She presented this work at the International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI) at Stanford University in January.

Halley is grateful to her advisers Nikolaus Correll and Shaun Kane for their support and encouragement in pursuing research interests in wearable technology, as well as Asta Roseway and Mary Czerwinski of the VIBE research group at Microsoft for their guidance and mentorship.

Author: Roni Dengler, 3rd year PhD candidate in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology

http://www.sciencebuffs.org/

Fashionable therapy brightens winter SADness was last modified: July 30th, 2015 by FashioningTech Contributor
July 30, 2015 0 comment
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Healthcare

Lightwear: An Exploration in Wearable Light Therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder

written by FashioningTech Contributor

“Lightwear” consists of a series of garment- and accessory-based light-emitting wearables designed to administer light therapy for on-the-go treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). To date, there have been few successful products developed for wearability and portability to ease the uncomfortable nature of traditional light box treatment.  Lightwear explores the integration of light into 3D printed and textile substrates to create fashion-forward wearables to address issues related to BLT efficacy, usability, adoption, and convenience. This work was recently presented at TEI 2015 and was developed at Microsoft Research by Halley Profita (CS PhD at CU Boulder), Asta Roseway, and Mary Czerwinski.

Bright Light Therapy (BLT) has been used to treat SAD for more than 25 years. While light boxes continue to serve as the predominant method of treatment, it often requires a user to sit at a dedicated location for a sustained period of time (30-60 minutes), rendering therapy inconvenient and resulting in unsatisfactory compliance rates. Other portable light treatment options, such as light visors, exist. However, they remain socially stigmatizing, obtrusive, and continue to obstruct many of the activities that portability seeks to solve. Our motivation for researching mobile treatment options comes from low adherence rates around using light boxes and light visors. New light-emitting materials and smaller hardware profiles permit for the exploration of novel, wearable form factors that can serve as alternative light therapy treatment options. The ‘Lightwear’ series was developed to explore how non-traditional textile and wearable forms of light therapy can help with BLT adoption and compliance.

Full Paper Citation:

Profita, Halley, Asta Roseway, and Mary Czerwinski. “Lightwear: An Exploration in Wearable Light Therapy.” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction. ACM, 2015.

Lightwear: An Exploration in Wearable Light Therapy for Seasonal Affective Disorder was last modified: February 4th, 2015 by FashioningTech Contributor
February 4, 2015 0 comment
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Healthcare

Vigour — A Gorgeous Wearable For Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

Designed by Pauline van Dongen in cooperation with TU Eindhoven & Textiel Museum, Vigour is a beautifully knitted cardigan with knit stretch sensors that continually monitors the wearer’s movement. 

The data connects to a mobile app that can be used by patients, therapists and caretakers to monitor and watch the rehabilitation process. 

Little detail is currently available on the app and explicitly how the garment can be used in rehabilitation, but the soft, knit design of the garment hints to the next phase of wearables: the movement away from devices to actual wearable garments. 

Vigour — A Gorgeous Wearable For Rehabilitation and Physical Therapy was last modified: December 18th, 2014 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
December 18, 2014 0 comment
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Healthcare

Space: What to wear?

written by Meg

In a news release last week on their blog, NASA announced the ForceShoe, designed by XSENS, a 3D motion tracking company. The shoe finely tracks pressure both in gravity and zero-gravity environments in order to analyze astronauts’ performance during weight-bearing exercises.  Let’s take a look:

Who knew that shuffleboard was a NASA-approved weight-bearing exercise? Photo: NASA

Our bones and muscles are optimized for Earth-like gravity conditions. That’s why extended periods of time spent in space result in bone-density and muscle strength degradation.  Weight-bearing exercises are difficult to do in weightless environments so space agencies have developed exercise machines using vacuum cylinders to help astronauts minimize the effects of time spent in zero-g.

The sandals will gather data on astronauts’ workout behavior both on Earth and in space in order to analyze the differences between these environments and design better exercises and equipment. These shoes aren’t a fashion item, they’re a device that’s part of a tool-kit.

It’s not really fair to judge this kind of tech without knowing all the constraints faced by the development team, so I do offer my critique with my tongue in my cheek. I’m sure that the amount of tech packed into these shoes would blow my tiny mind, but I’m still going to give you my two cents (one cent technical, one cultural):

1. Was it necessary to make such a large device? In space missions, every ounce counts, so surely a slipper or sock would have been a better solution. I can imagine reasons against designing the sensors themselves from textiles (accuracy, degradation over time, etc), but surely the upper could have been made from polypropylene or a similar light-weight polymer?

2. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but space still holds an aura of romantic ideal for me. Yes, I know that you’re essentially drinking your own pee and that space craft are notoriously filthy, with all that hair and dead skin-cell matter trapped inside… But thankfully it’s too far away for us to see from back here on Earth, and our ambassadors to space are idealized versions of ourselves. Couldn’t the shoes look a bit more, um, space age?

As an antidote, take a look at Dutch designer/researcher Marina Toeters’ Moon Life collection. Designed in 2011in collaboration with the European Space Agency, the collection is as an exploration into how textile technology can improve our future space lifestyles.

Ultra-lightweight, resizable jacket, 100% recyclable waterproof trousers from Marina Toeter’s Moon Life collection. Photo: Human&Kind and by-wire.net

Marina’s collection might be more for your great-grand children’s moon lifestyles, but with her fully integrated antibacterial yarns and body-friendly designs it’s a more subtle approach to space apparel. And the collection doesn’t forget about life on Earth, using recycled and recyclable materials to conserve resoures and cultural references to remind us of our history and humanity.

The realities of space style thankfully land somewhere between the hyper-functional ForceShoe and Marina’s Moon Life.  The Smithonian Institute’s Suited for Space exhibition looks like a great way to see exactly what space explorers have been wearing for, well, the history of space exploration.

One of the suits in the Suited for Space exhibition. See, space is filthy… and awesome! Photo: National Air and Space Museum

The traveling exhibition is listed to appear around the US in Philadelphia, Seattle, Yorba Linda (not confirmed) and Montezuma over the next 18 months. Take a look at their webpage to find out more details.

And who knows, maybe humanity will surprise me and the ForceShoe will become a style icon, sparking a trend in spring-loaded Birkenstocks…

Space: What to wear? was last modified: June 7th, 2014 by Meg
June 7, 2014 0 comment
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Healthcare

E-textile Pillow for Communication Between Dementia Patients and Family

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

Similar in function to Vibe-ing, Tactile Dialogues is a beautifully designed e-textile pillow constructed with touch sensors and vibrating motors. The pillow is used to generate a positive interaction between a caregiver and an individual suffering from severe dementia. 

Vibe-ing and Tactile Dialogues essentially use the very same technologies yet take on very different forms. Worn on the body, Vibe-ing is a personal and intimate tool used to promote self-healing. Tactile Dialogues instead is a medium to generate interaction and conversation. 

Both of these wonderful projects point to the importance of how much form and context (not the technology specifically) shape the development of the user experience. 

They also give us a glimpse into the future of wearables: tactile knits and wovens, with haptic feedback mechanisms that are a pleasure to touch and wear. 

Tactile dialogues is a collaboration between Eindhoven University of Technology (Martijn ten Bhömer), De Wever Borre Akkersdijk, Optima Textiles BV and Metatronics.

E-textile Pillow for Communication Between Dementia Patients and Family was last modified: November 5th, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
November 5, 2013 0 comment
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Healthcare

Wearable Tech for Vibration Therapy

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

As part of an e-textile research project for Smart Textile Services (CRISP), designers Eunjeong Jeon, Kristi Kuusk, Martijn ten Bhömer and Jesse Asjes have developed a therapeutic wearable to treat a variety of physical ailments, including pain, sports injuries, and bone density loss.

 

Aptly called “Vibe-ing,” the wearable is embedded with circuits that can sense touch and actuate a vibrating motor on specific pressure points on the body.

 

As our bodies vary in size, the garments must be customized to suit the wearer’s needs and size.

 

Made from merino wool, the garment is beautifully constructed.

 

Learn more about the therapeutic wearable here. 

 

Wearable Tech for Vibration Therapy was last modified: November 5th, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
November 5, 2013 0 comment
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Healthcare

DIY Biohacking: Experimenting with Implanting Biochips

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

It’s difficult to completely digest the implications of this video. The the simple questions around data ownership  and the ethical implications of wearable technology become expounded once individuals begin to hack their own bodies without the blessing of the medical community. 

Share your thoughts below.

DIY Biohacking: Experimenting with Implanting Biochips was last modified: November 1st, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
November 1, 2013 0 comment
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Healthcare

TacitLanguage – Led Finger Gloves for Hearing Impaired

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

Developed by Hannah Faesenkloet, TacitLanguage is an assistive technology for the hearing impaired to text in low light situations.

The LED finger gloves illuminate the user’s digits as well as face when the user communicates via sign language. I’m not certain how effective the gloves are as companions for sign language, but I can imagine them being used in different contexts such as for cyclists using hand signals at night or police officers guiding traffic when a stop light is broken.

TacitLanguage – Led Finger Gloves for Hearing Impaired was last modified: September 18th, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
September 18, 2013 0 comment
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Healthcare

Murr-ma – Amphibious Prosthetic

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

Prosthetics are perhaps the purest form of wearable technology. They have become a profound medium for designers and engineers to imagine how our bodies may evolve in the distant future while remaining sensitive and honest to their exigent role of replacing lost limbs.

In the Alternative Limb Project, Sophie de Oliveira Barata re-imagines prosthetics as stylized, one-of-a-kind couture limbs that reflect her client’s personality and identity. Unlike Barata’s handcrafted prostheses, Hugh Hurr’s bionic-ankles look like high-tech machines designed for performance —  they can propel him forward in 400-watt bursts. 

Increasing prosthetics are being designed and developed for niche markets and specific activities with sports and fitness taking center stage. 

 

Murr-ma is an example of a prosthetic  prototype designed specifically for high performance water sports and beach activities. Whether you are learning how to surf or playing beach volley ball, Murr-ma promises to help its users navigate the challenging terrain of sand and water. 

 

On land, the split-toe design helps with balancing the uneven sandy terrain of the beach while the studs provide a larger surface area for better grip on the soft sand. 

 

In the sea, the beauty of the Murr-ma is its ability to enhance the swimming experience through its clever “fin” design . Inspired by dorsal fin of the sale fish — the fastest fish in the world — the fins located at the top of the prosthesis channel the water flow alongside the carbon fibre backbone and out at the sides, providing the wearer with the necessary thrust to move through the surf. 

 

The Project is a collaboration between designers Thomas Essl, Julia Johnson, Yuki Machida, and Damian Rocca.   

Murr-ma – Amphibious Prosthetic was last modified: August 7th, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
August 7, 2013 0 comment
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Healthcare

Smart Fashion That Fights Malaria

written by Syuzi Pakhchyan

According to World Health Organization, about 3.3 billion people — half the world’s population— are at risk of malaria. In 2010 alone, there were an estimated 219 millions cases of malaria and 660,000 reported deaths. Malaria prevention typically consists of using long-lasting insecticidal nets (essentially bed nets ) and indoor spraying of pesticides to control mosquito pollutions. 

With her Spring 2012 collection ‘Njehringe,’ Matilda Ceesay takes a more personal approach to malaria prevention. Ceesay has designed garments that use a new, experimental smart fabric infused with insecticide “crystals” that are safer and more durable than current skin-based repellent sprays. 

The significance of Ceesay’s work hints at the new, evocative role for fashion that moves beyond protection and closer towards prevention.

In the near future, we may soon expect our garments not only to protect us from the rain and wind, but also from the sun’s dangerous ultra violet rays, insect-born diseases, and even environmental toxins. 

Considering that the most vulnerable population for malaria are children, I would love to see a line of protective clothing — specifically pajamas – designed for kids.

via designboom

Smart Fashion That Fights Malaria was last modified: July 18th, 2013 by Syuzi Pakhchyan
July 18, 2013 0 comment
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