Electronics that can bend

Cambridge, Massachusetts advanced materials company, MC10, is cookin' up some amazing bendable high-performance electronics that us wearable technology folks would LOVE to get our dirty little hands on. Imagine a shirt that could monitor your heart rate without wires or clunky devices. Or garments that are flexible and move with your body as they collect your biometric data and help you live a healthier life. MC10 seems to be paving the way and rumor from the Twittersphere is that adidas is currently working with them on ... does anyone know? The future is promising.

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Woven electronics for commercialization

[gallery] "Researchers have been experimenting with “intelligent” textiles for quite some time by integrating standard electronic components. However, for the most part the electronic parts have only been attached to or sewn into plain old clothes like coats or T-shirts – an endeavor ultimately doomed to fail because of one practical drawback: they’re difficult to wash. Moreover, it takes a lot of handiwork to produce them, which bumps up the price of the clothes.

Scientists from Professor Gerhard Tröster’s Wearable Computing Lab, however, have now gone one step further: they’ve developed a new technology to attach thin-film electronics and miniaturized, commercially available chips to plastic fibers. The researchers eventually succeeded in integrating a large number of microchips and other microelectronic elements directly into the architecture of the material. In order to weave the E-fibers into conventional threads, the ETH-Zurich scientists used customary textile machines." Continue reading on ETH Zurich.

Images from ETH Zurich via talk2myshirt.com