wearable electronics Archives

The emerging wearable technology craze has spread…to socks. Crazy idea? Well, not really, when you dig deeper. Sure, they act as an ultra-precise step tracker. However, with multiple sensors in the sock communicating to your smartphone via an anklet, they can help warn people who are excessively heal-striking. This might even be of some use to barefoot runners (few of which run truly barefoot, so they’d be used to wearing socks already), though barefoot runners instinctively avoid heal striking already. It can also monitor your cadence and notify you of changes needed to meet goals there.

You can read more about them at SenSoria’s website or preorder here. Check out the video below.

Sensoria Fitness Smart Sock Tracker from Heapsylon on Vimeo.

Thermoelectric devices have been around for a long time, and offer the awesome ability of converting a heat difference (one side of the device cold, the other hot) into electrical energy – or reversing the process and using electricity to create that thermal difference (great for car-powered refrigerators, for example). Now, researchers at Wake Forest University have taken this basic technology and transformed it into a multi-layer, flexible felt-like fabric. Possible applications could include wearable electronics (though the ambient air temperature needs to be significantly lower than body temperature), or simple things like wrapping pipes in this.

Portable electronics have always struggled with their power sources, with design having been a tradeoff between storage capacity and size/weight/cost. Being able to generate energy on the move would be a big benefit.

Tag: wearable electronics

Smart socks (no, really!)

Flexible Thermoelectric Fabric