Few things encourage businesses to be more imaginative than the opportunities presented by new technology. But the latest high-tech fad involves the mother of all things faddish  fashion.

"Smart" textiles that can respond to touch or carry electrical signals have prompted entrepreneurs to develop an array of innovative clothes and consumer products.

Smart fabrics and interactive textiles (SFITs) are made by weaving new conductive materials into fabrics, which turns them into sensors and electrical conduits. Chris Rezendes, executive vice president of Venture Development Corp., a market research firm based in Natick, Mass., says the global market for SFIT materials is worth $300 million to $500 million.

This marriage of consumer electronics and fashion has prompted British companies Eleksen Group, Fibretronic Ltd. and Softswitch Ltd. to compete to integrate controls for personal electronics goods such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods into clothing. Eleksen has also designed flexible fabric keyboards for partners including Microsoft Corp.

London-based CuteCircuit is pushing the envelope with its Hug Shirt, which hits the shelves next year.

The shirt measures pressure, heartbeat and temperature as a wearer hugs him- or herself. A mobile phone transmits the data to another shirt, which replicates the hug. The shirt will cost "around the same as an iPod," executives said.

"A lot of those first applications have been a little gimmicky, and that doesn't make for profitable, robust businesses, unfortunately," warned Rob Ricketts, a consultant at Pera, a company that advises on commercializing innovations.

He said SFIT designers were still pushing the technology without having found the right product: "We're waiting for the application that makes people stand up and recognize that this isn't just for iPod jackets."

Those applications exist beyond fashion in markets such as health, the military and emergency services, Rezendes said. The key will be to make these applications relevant for the consumer market for example, with textiles that monitor a wearer's vital signs, such as heart rate, and then transmit the data to third parties.

Rezendes predicts that an aging, affluent population will be a significant market for garments that can monitor the welfare of the elderly.

Philips Design, a division of Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics, has developed a fabric that measures and transmits heart activity data to a personal digital assistant. The company is participating in a European Union-funded project called MyHeart, exploring smart clothing that can provide early warnings of heart disease.

Early commercial products using such technologies are showing up in the sports consumer market.

Textronics Inc., a spinoff from former DuPont Co. textiles unit Invista, sells a sports bra that senses the wearer's heartbeat and sends the data to a wrist device to help a user monitor her heart rate during workouts. And Ventura-based VivoMetrics Inc. has sold its LifeShirt to the military and emergency services markets.


About the author:

Danny Bradbury, Financial Times -http://www.cccfcs.com/FCS/uploads/smart%20clothingLAT.pdf

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