Wearables

The RSPCA has partnered with pet wearable company PitPat in order to improve dog welfare and get people spending more time out and about with their pets. The animal welfare charity - the oldest and largest in the UK - is hoping its partnership with PitPat will help lead the way in improving responsible dog ownership and encourage more owners to play and interact with their dogs.  

When you hear the word GPS tracker, what do you think? A small, wearable device used to track people, pets and animals, which have made life easier for parents, pet owners, wildlife researchers, farmers, and businesses alike. By providing real‑time positioning information, parents can keep an eye on their kids from afar, farmers can easily keep track of their livestock, and businesses can monitor lone workers in the field.

North Carolina State University research into wearable robotics shows how amputees wearing these devices adapted when presented with a real-world challenge: carrying a weighted backpack. The results could assist device manufacturers and clinicians expand the utility of these important devices, and could help researchers develop smarter controllers that adapt to real-world demands.

A new type of smart fabric developed at the University of Washington could pave the way for jackets that store invisible passcodes and open the door to your apartment or office. The UW computer scientists have created fabrics and fashion accessories that can store data - from security codes to identification tags - without needing any on-board electronics or sensors.

It’s not quite a natural combination bringing together electronics and sportswear. First of all the materials are very different, you have hard, rigid and fragile electronics compared to the soft, flexible, robust and washable textiles. However, bringing the two together opens up a world of new possibilities and innovations, as a team of Fashion Design students from Shih Chien University, Taiwan found out when they recently attended a ...

  Three students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working on a way to stabilise broken arms so as to avoid the downsides of traditional casts. Plaster and fibreglass casts that are used now don’t let air in and out, making the skin below itchy and smelly, and sometimes causing serious infections.

A watch that works in multiple dimensions and a smart ring that provides calendar alerts are among the top technology Dartmouth College will bring to the 30th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017). Other technology to be introduced by the Dartmouth team includes a thumb-tip recognition technique that optimises interaction with computer applications.

Back in 2012, we were introduced to the Nike+ FuelBand, which proved to have the appeal of wrist‑based activity tracking, and now ever since the category has exploded. Nowadays, a whole industry has emerged around this market, led by brands like Fitbit and Xiaomi. Whereas early fitness trackers could get by on simple activity monitoring using a basic accelerometer, nowadays the market is much more competitive. 

A team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a way to create electrically heated cloth. Materials scientist Trisha Andrew explains they took a plain pair of cotton gloves and used a vapor deposition method for nano-coating fabric to coat the fingers in a polymer known as poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), or PEDOT. A coin battery weighing 1.8 grams (0.0039 lbs.) provides power to the gloves, but not enough power to pass...

Wearable sensors are revolutionising the tech-world, capable of tracking processes in the body, such as heart rates. They're even becoming fashionable, with many of them sporting sleek, stylish designs. But wearable sensors also can have applications in detecting threats that are external to the body. Researchers now report in ACS Sensors a first-of-its kind device that can do just that. And to stay fashionable, they've designed it as a ring.