Smarty-pants ideas to make work better

Wearable IT is starting to have an impact in sport and may soon make a significant improvement to the lives of thousands of workers.

In my last column, I lamented the slow pace at which clothes are fusing with IT. Now, at the How Smart Are We? London symposium on electronic textiles, I’m more optimistic. Wearable IT will change how we work.

As design firm CuteCircuit points out, most of the IT in the textile industry is today used in mills, or to track garments via RFID wireless tags. But soon IT will be more directly applied to textiles as products. Workwear, which has become more fashionable over the years, is now poised to grow more functional.

First, smart workwear will emerge in outdoor occupations. From the University of Wales, Newport, Jane McCann shows us ski jackets with built-in cameras to record each descent. It’s an idea that could spread to thousands of public servants with field jobs. Compared with retrieving and operating conventional digital cameras, it ought to be easy to record, say, endless streets of urban dereliction with a device mounted on your chest, and controls on your forearm.

The same principles of information collection apply indoors, too. Miles Jordan, design manager at Eleksen, Pinewood, specialises in fabric interfaces. He notes that giving employees garment-based scanners and stock-monitoring devices could make inventory control easier inside warehouses, shops and large offices.

Second, burgeoning laws on workplace health, along with an ageing labour force, will make some employers want to use smart textiles where jobs are physically exacting. From Wilmington, Delaware, Qaizar Hassonjee of Textronics shows a women’s sports bra complete with knitted electrodes. It monitors heart rates with great accuracy and comfort – and it can endure more than 100 washes, too. Textronics plans a belt version for sportsmen.

As with the ski jacket that’s also a camera, the smart sports belt today could end up in sectors such as construction tomorrow.

Third, smart textiles can be smart about energy. A concept garment for co mmuter cyclists designed by Goose and PDD, for instance, has an el ectroluminescent back powered by printed photovoltaic batteries mounted on the cyclist’s shoulder. As more and more employees cycle to work, enterprises may want to make sure that their staff arrive safely with devices like this.

Brian McCarthy of TechniTex, a Manchester incubator of firms in technical textiles, reports on another energy application. He notes how professors from PSG College of Technology in India want to help soldiers on the move dispense with the 12kg of batteries they usually need for telecoms. By stitching a magnet and induction coil into trousers, the professors can generate power from a soldier’s body movements, recharging a 9V battery in their boots.

It can’t be long before this military means of powering mobile equipment transfers to civilian occupations.