In the future, leaving the phone charger at home will only mean one thing: You forgot to wear your pants.
Just as smartphones free users from desktop computers, smart clothing will also take out personal electronics from our pockets and sleeves.
The new generation of wearable technology, including smart glasses and watches, is still more marginal than mainstream technology.
Google glasses failed, and over time, almost a third of those who bought fitness trackers lost interest. But gadget-
Packaged clothing may have an advantage when seamlessly integrated into our lives.
"A meeting where someone stood up and [said]
"I understand that wearable technology is one thing, but I just don't think I'm willing to get up every day and remember what to put on," recalls Lucy Dunn, a wearable technology researcher.
"I looked at her and said, 'You are dressed now.
I'm pretty sure you did.
Some premium clothing is already on sale, such as gloves with hot threads
On extra cold days, connect the wires to a warm finger, or a bathing suit equipped with UV sensors to alert sunloungers when they approach excessive baking.
But the engineers looked at a rich menu.
Clothes that can make daily life more convenient
Or just look better.
However, the first task is to transform traditional electronic products.
The typical battery pack and digital display is too hard and heavy to weave into the daily duds.
Engineers are becoming more and more creative in making light, flexible equipment that keeps the clothes comfortable and still performs as well as bulky equipment.
Once researchers have made something that works well and is reasonably wearable, they still have to make sure that their stuff is strong enough to withstand the daily wear and tear, not to mention going through the laundry room. Most next-
Gen clothing is a few years away from retail shelves.
In fact, many technologies have not yet left the lab.
But fashionistas and fashionistas can look forward to the future of e-fashion.
There's a sneak peek here.
Woven clothes from color
Changing yarn can give a whole new meaning to the phrase "anything can.
Most existing colors
Changing textiles like the sunactivated T-
The design shirt from white to Rainbow is caused by ambient lighting or changes in body heat.
Now researchers use their smartphone screens to make clothes that can change color.
The costumes presented at the spring meeting of the Materials Research Association, held in Phoenix in April 4, were made of a few strands of yarn with hair as thick.
Each yarn includes copper wire sheaths in a polymer sleeve.
Joshua Kaufman, a researcher in optics and optics, says this polymer can be polyester, nylon, or other material depending on how soft or strong you want your fabric to be, co-developer of yarn at Central Florida University in Orlando.
Pigments are added to the polymer sleeves, which change color as the temperature changes, too subtle for the wearer.
The wearer controls the look of the garment by sending Wi-
From the smartphone to the Fi signal connected to the battery on the garment.
The battery injects the current into the copper wire of the yarn and heats the pigment to activate the color switch.
These yarns allow the clothes to rotate between solids, stripes, folds and other patterns.
Fashion trendsetters and those who can't decide what to wear in the morning may be the ones who get the most out of the technology.
But it will also benefit us.
Sprinkle the food on your light
The colorful shirt at lunch covered up dark stains.
When you go home by bike in the sun or in the dark, want to wear a light-colored dress and click on an app.
Need to sneak in a second-
Skip the laundry and wear it for a day.
Ayman Abouraddy, also an optical and photon researcher in Central Florida, said the fabric could also be used for bags, car interiors, curtains and furniture.
"We don't expect to be more than a year or two before you buy something
Made of these fabrics]
He said: "from the mall.
One day, you may decorate your clothes with enough data to get you into the building.
The researchers created the password.
Store clothes made of lines containing silver or copper scraps.
Usually, the poles of the atoms in these metal lines point in a random direction.
However, keep the magnet close to the line, align all the poles of the fabric to the north or south.
These magnetic directions encode some data, 1 or 0 that an instrument called a magnetic field meter can read. This data-
Embedded fabric was presented on last October at the user interface software and technical workshop of the computer machinery association of Quebec City, to preserve its magnetic information by washing, drying and ironing
At least in the short term.
The strength of the data signal dropped by about 30% in a week.
This material can be remagnetized in the same or different modes of 1 s and 0 s, but researchers must first build a device that can rewrite this data, justin Chen, computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle, similar to the technology used to reprogram hotel key cards.
Chan and colleagues in Washington, Shyam Gollakota, wrote magnetic codes on ties, belts and wristbands, but the technology is still in its infancy.
Now, each 1 or 0 is about 2 centimeters.
Researchers are working to package more data into smaller samples, Chan said. Once data-
You can simply scan your sleeves and enter your office or apartment building.
This does not seem to be a great improvement for some people.
But those forgetful people who put the keys in the wrong place every other day may not like the things that rush on the way out.
Training yourself to drive golf, play the piano or sit in a better position can become much easier due to exercise
A slight twitch of clothes was detected.
"If you want to know exactly what someone is doing --
Whether they bend their knees in a healthy way or their heart rate and muscle activity tell you about their emotional state --
Then you need sensors everywhere, "Dunn said.
To this end, industrial engineer Joshua De Graff and his colleagues have made ultra-thin motion detectors that can be embedded in anything from shoulder support to the sole.
The key component of these sensors is a material called buckypaper.
Dense carbon nano-pipe networks as thick as red blood cells are wide. Normally,().
However, the tensile material creates a gap in the nanotubes network, which hinders the flow of charge.
The de Graf team at Florida State University in Tallahassee is taking advantage of this weakness.
Connecting a piece of cloth base paper to the circuit and measuring the change of resistance on the paper can reveal the number of cloth base paper
The paper was stretched. .
The sensor described in last November can be powered by a watch
The size of the battery is very large, deGraf said.
The Buckypaper sensor may be useful for those who need to micromanage their movements in the short term-
Like physiotherapy patients, their rehabilitation requires them to move in the manner prescribed by the therapist. Light-
The costumes of the future don't look and feel like your uncle's ugly Christmas sweater, more like a trendy suit in a movie.
Actress Claire Danes lights up 2016 Met Gala in a dress with LEDs.
But the standard semiconductor
Seonil Kwon, an engineer at Korea's Institute of Advanced Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, said led-based LEDs are too hard and brittle to make comfortable daily wear.
Organic LEDs or oled, on the other hand, are razors
Thin and soft.
OLED display contains a layer of organic or carbon cake
Film based on material.
OLED lights up when the power is on-
Like a battery.
Drive the charge from one layer of organic material to the other, and the negative electron enters the positive hole of the material.
When a positive and negative electron pair turn off, they give off a brief flash. Many positive-
Negative sessions per second keep OLED lit.
Oled is usually made of plastic or glass, but Kwon and his colleagues make oled on fabrics.
The researchers put these 200 nanometers of oled on a laminated polyester film on a fabric made of tightly woven microfiber.
The setting is more flexible than the plastic platform used to make curved displays. The new fabric-
Kwon and his colleagues said in a last July report that OLED-based OLED will only emit one color, but engineers can make fabrics.
Screen based on multiple colors
Change OLED pixels to display messages.
Rights's team also produced OLED lines for fonts and patterns and reported the work in the January. 10 .
Is there a consumer who feels the act of pulling out a phone from their pocket is so heavy that they want to take a smartphone screen on their sleeves, who knows.
But in a single dress.
In the evening, color oled can illuminate pedestrians and cyclists.
Quan also imagined creating OLED clothing in glowing white to provide light therapy.
Some people suffer, they send white light to imitate the outdoor Sun ().
A shirt that can shine white or the lower side of the edge of the hat can provide light therapy to go where you go.
Rajan Kumar, a nano engineer at the University of California, San Diego, said that after a full day of work, "No one is willing to take off his shirt and plug it in . ".
Long battery life of smart clothing is the key.
So why not design wearable devices and constantly convert sunlight and sports energy into electrical energy researchers in 2016.
The fabric is mainly made of synthetic polymers and wool fibers, which are light in weight and soft and breathable. A 4-by-5-
Stanford University materials scientist and engineer Chen said in June that wearing cm-long clothes while running in the sun can charge the phone, and he works at the King Bell Lab at Georgia Tech. The sunlight-
Connect the fabric with photovoltaic wires.
When the sun shines on the wire, the light particles will knock off the electrons in the atoms in a layer of material, leaving a hole with positive electricity.
Another electronic
The conductive layer of the wire collects these loose electrons, while the third layer collects holes with positive electricity.
The voltage generated by this charge separation can power the device.
At the same time, other parts of this structure convert the energy of movement into electric energy.
These samples contain a band called a four fluorine polymer.
Places where electronics gather
Staggered with copper wire-
It's easy to give up electronics.
When the fabric is folded or compressed, the electrons of some copper wire are rubbed off on the PTFE plastic strip.
This process generates static electricity, just like combing your hair or taking off your sweater in the winter.
When the fabric is relaxed, the negatively charged PTFE plastic strip is separated from the positive copper wire to power the equipment.
Wang of Georgia Tech said that the stripes of this material can be sewn on the sleeves to generate energy from the swing of the arm, or sewn on the sole to gain energy from footsteps, materials scientists and engineers.
When you walk around or sit in the sun, the energy that this fabric gathers can also be ().
Storage devices can be made from zinc-containing ink
As stated on 2017, silver oxide is printed directly on the garment.
Or, as reported on April 24
Harvesting materials can also be built in tents, and when the tent is bathed in the sun or sanded by the wind, the tent can charge the equipment of the campers.
If a thermoelectric generator is installed in the clothes, the body's heat will become electricity.
Researchers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh work with a button
A large generator containing a grid of semiconductor rods sandwiched between two ceramic plates.
When one side of the generator is hotter than the other-
Say when that side is close to your skin and the other side is exposed to the air
The warm-end electrons of each semiconductor stick become nervous.
These electrons spread to the cold side of the device, creating a tiny voltage on the rod.
Connecting the positive end of each stick to the negative end of the next stick increases these voltages, such as stacking batteries in a flashlight.
Daryoosh Vashaee, electrical engineer in NC State, and colleagues embedded these thermoelectric generators into T-shirt.
If someone is just sitting in a shirt, the generator does not generate much power because the temperature difference between the skin and the surrounding air is very small.
But if that person gets up for a walk or jog, the rise in body temperature will heat T-
When the wind cools the side of the generator exposed, the shirt.
In a test, the researchers reported on 2016 that the wearer's generator while walking and 18 μW/cm while jogging.
Unfortunately, this is not enough to power a smart watch or mobile phone.
But a few centimeters of generator can provide low energy.
Power sensors like heart monitors.
Researchers are trying to improve the efficiency of the generator to support more power
Hungry electronics?
If researchers can make better thermoelectric generators even if the wearer is sitting, the technology will have an advantage over sunlight --
Sports harvesting clothing: you can power up your stuff while eating on the couch.
Science News