At the University of California San Diego, researches have developed biomedical tracking sensors that can be printed directly onto clothing. This technology is able to monitor the blood pressure and heart rate of patients by just wearing the clothes.

Source: PSFK

Warm and safe! Lost Values has a range of accessories from  hats to  scarves for sale that are hand crafted  with Scottish wool from the Highlands and reflective yarn.

Source: Fashioning Technology

Last Friday, I went (togehter with my colleague Niels) to the Smart Textiles Salon in Gent (Belgium). It was a workshop, were different prototypes were presented. What I really liked was the fact that it was a collection of initiatives from various backgrounds: very technical ones but also projects with a background in the arts).

A project, I liked very much was the one of Berit Greinke, called “SHHH…, Amplifying textiles”. She recently graduated from MA Textile Futures Course at St. Martins and presented in fact an adaptation of her MA project. The main idea behind her work is that it makes a connection between textiles and sound: a connection which isn’t very obvious. She made a machine which reads the charateristics of fabric and makes them auditorily perceptible.

Clothing  is seen as an expression of one’s identity or as a symbol of the social group/culture one is belonging to, so why not wearing a smart, flex-image fabric that displays pieces of ones social network directly on clothes.

The OSMO Custom Social Network Wearable allows participants to customize clothing with smart, flex-image fabric.

The OSMO wearable is not only a wearable piece of your personal voice but it’s also connected, networked and alive. It communicates with your iPhone applications, detects “friends” from your Loopt™ profile and picks up and displays images from other participants in close proximity.

Source: Talk2myShirt, Creating Space

Remember to keep 30 April 2009 available, since the Flanders Fashion Institute organises a conference on “Smart fashion: creativity and intelligent fabrics”.

The conference will take place in the Yohji Yamamoto Auditorium of  Flanders Fashion Institute - ModeNatie,  Drukkerijstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp.

The full programme can be found here!