Wearable Electronics

We all know of optical fibers, the filaments of glass that carry data in the form of light pulses and enable the high-speed global telecommunications networks we take for granted today. For the past decade, Yoel Fink has been working at MIT to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties which enable fabrics to interact with their environment. Fink and his collaborators have now announced a new milestone on the path to functional fibers – fibers that can detect and produce sound. Read More

As the technology to support wearable electronics advances, researchers are investigating new ways of making our clothing more "intelligent" – from smart shirts for theater ushers to the development of clothing that can respond to the wearer’s emotive state. So would it surprise you to learn that your humble underpants could one day save your life? A new study has shown that printed sensors on the elastic band of your underpants could monitor biomarkers in your sweat and tears, make autonomous diagnoses and even administer life-saving drugs. Read More

You’ve had a hard day at the office, your spouse is currently over 2,000 miles away and now your boss says he wants you to work late. It’s all you can do to contain your anger until you get into the bathroom, whereupon you let loose with a string of red-faced, high-cardio profanity. At that point, your spouse talks to you via your shirt. “Take it easy, it’s all right,” they coo from your collar, as they play your favorite song, and photos of them scroll across your chest. Hey, it could happen. No, really, it could happen, thanks to the Wearable Absence project. Researchers involved in the program are working on developing intelligent textiles, that comfort the wearer by evoking memories of absent loved ones. Read More

“A chilling blue Japanese inspired LED watch from an entropic tomorrow which gives its master below zero Kelvin supremacy by blurring the boundaries of how temporal intelligence (time) is shown...” Good Lord, I can’t top that. That’s how online retailer Chinavasion describes the Ice Samurai watch, a very cool-looking and suspiciously-inexpensive timepiece that offers yet another take on displaying the time. In this case, it’s done with blue - sorry, ice blue LEDs that are incorporated into the watch band itself. And you know what that watch band is made of? Get ready... “Samurai sword carbonized steel folded 1000x over!” Read More

Watches, movies, poems and paintings... a lot of people think that the harder any one of these things are to understand, then the better they are. We’ve certainly covered some intentionally-obscure watches here at Gizmag before, with everything from a row of LEDs to numbers on a sphere to dots that get filled in and stained glass-like patterns used to display the time. Now, Japanese weird-watch-maker EleeNo brings us one that displays the hours, minutes and seconds on a climbing line graph. Read More

Purveyor of weird watches, Tokyoflash, has blended the old with the new in its latest creation, the Kisai Round Trip Pocket Watch. Designed to attach to a key chain, belt loop or even on a chain in your top pocket like a traditional pocket watch, the Round Trip continues Tokyoflash’s history of releasing timepieces that make telling the time a puzzle to be decoded. Read More

Some of you may recall our piece on Honda's Body Support Assist prototype last year. As a quick update to that story, those of you in the New York area will get a chance to see it in person as a part of the "Why Design Now?" exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Read More

The "Broke" is the latest weird and wonderful watch design from Tokyoflash. Featuring a fragmented stained-glass window-like display, the outermost LED lit fragments on the Broke represent the hour, while inner fragments represent five minute intervals and central fragments indicate one to four minutes. The current time is displayed by which of the LED fragments are blinking. Got all that? Read More

Either my ears provide a tight fit or I’m just not as active as I should be, but I wasn’t aware that earbuds falling out was a major problem. For those that do experience such heartbreak Sony has come up with a solution in the form of its new Qlasp bud headphones. The headphones feature a nifty “qlasp” that clips to the wearer’s earlobes to ensure they stay put even during the most extreme physical activities. Read More

Hands-free calling using Bluetooth earpieces has become - shall we say - controversial over the years, as we've all seen that annoying guy at Starbucks trying to close the deal as he orders his cappuccino. But the latest receiver from Tokyo Flash, the Kisai Escape C, might just have enough features to offset the Bluetooth douche-factor. Read More