Ready-to-Wear Watchdogs: 'Smart' Garments Keep Track of Vital Signs, Hide Oder.

This week's article was about generating garments that we wear on a daily basis to become the new high tech product on the market. Technology companies want to transform basic attire to fit the futuristic mentality many of us carry.

 Companies all over the world are talking about many attributes they can add onto garments that can benefit us all, starting with their youngest customer with baby wear. They want to construct baby sleepwear that sounds an alarm if at any point the child stops breathing. There is a brand new form of "Nano Technology" to create fabric that will resist wrinkles, and will stay drier through out the day. This technology will work though the use of molecular scaled sponges that absorb any body oder or sweat. Another form of advancing fashion is configuring the clothing in a way that it can react and function using wires, heat pressure, and electricity that will help expanding, loosening, tightening, or even making your garment warmer of cooler depending on where the person is weather wise, or how the person is feeling. Also another cool aspect that can be added to the clothing in our closets is that the fibers used to create the clothing will have a reflective quality that will allow you to change the color of the shirt on your body through an electrical signal configured into the fibers. 

Many of these technological fibers that are being invented are already being featured in high performance fabrics used by companies such as Nike. This technology is being put into play as we speak, just last year a company called Philips NV of the Netherlands collaborated with Levi Strauss denim and designed a jacket with a built in MP3 player and a cellphone giving technology a new name.  Also, a researcher from MIT tested out a "smart" space suit that was made up of wearable computers, this same researcher created a "smart" vest which was also made up of conductive fibers that could be used to plug in wearable devices. A start up company called Sensatex Inc. is trying to create a T-shirt for athletes that will monitor heart rate, body temperature along with counting the calories you are burning while wearing the shirt. 

The newest invention that is in the works is the Motorola Inc's. new washing machine where you can "talk" to the machine, giving the machine instructions by the clothes themselves. Depending on how the garment is supposed to be washed, the washer will take direct directions so the fabric will not get ruined.