Dress smarter for a better life

Fashionistas and technologists are starting to develop off-the-peg solutions to everyday problems.

With the Nike/iPod “Sport Kit”, you place a wireless sensor in your Nike+ shoe, attach the receiver to your iPod Nano, and listen to voice feedback as you run, tracking your time, distance, pace and calories burned on http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/.

It’s the kind of breakthrough, that I first heard mooted back in 1996 when I was at the worldwide HQ of Philips in Eindhoven, where, coincidentally, the talk was of an alliance with Nike. Why has it taken so long?

Maybe the delay reflects the fact that textiles is a “soft” discipline and IT a hard one. But I don’t buy that. In the US, the Department of Defense has long sought to integrate electronics with textiles-based body armour. In Britain, too, New Labour always tries to ram broadly unrelated scientific disciplines together, in the hope that something wondrous will emerge, and cheaply, too.

But the problem with interdisciplinary approaches is that they too often lack depth in any of the disciplines they glibly try to weld. And with “smart” textiles, I fear that the depth is lacking not so much with the textiles, as with the smartness – with the IT.

The world certainly needs garments that can withstand washing and drying, yet monitor our health, sense our surroundings, and allow us to communicate. And at Boots, one can buy wearable white devices that track blood pressure and heart rate. Yet despite all our unhealthy obsessions with health nowadays, such gadgets are generally unpromoted, and lie almost hidden on obscure shelves. Nor, despite what goes on in British trains during the summer, do we appear interested in using IT to manage our workwear or leisurewear for different conditions of temperature and humidity.

In fact we can understand all this if we look at mobile communications. There the pace of innovation is much slower than is widely thought. Mobile companies prefer ring tones, games and TV clips to decent coverage, proper voice quality, 3G, or industry-specific applications – let alone a useful marriage with textiles.

It’s time that textiles people got rid of the chip about technology that they have on their shoulderpad and instead took their cousins in IT to task. Textiles might be a bit backward, but, as a sector, IT has much bigger responsibilities. To make a garment that’s as much of an IT wizard as it is a must-have fashion statement – that’s the challenge.

Readers wanting to learn more about smart textiles may like to attend the “How Smart Are We?” Symposium on Friday 15 September in London, where I will be speaking together with others from industry and academia. For details see the URL below.