Today the name of intelligent clothing features with various fields, from simple light clothing, which has diffused advertising, clothing or heating communicating, fields of application are numerous. They are already used in snowboard, astronauts or firemen combinations, but it seems once again that they may well invade our environment.
The clothes are mainly developed by sportswear industry (natation, football, running, cyclist…). For instance the remote control is integrated into the cloth and allows with mp3, mp4 and Ipod.
Nanotechnology is an answer of this kind of technology, at this the time we can produce clothes that repel insects, change color or diffuse light … or tissues that will harden on impact, and more unrealistic some clothes bring the power of invisibility!
We can imagine that the marketing of this type of clothing is still far to the large public. But they could be used in areas such as medicine, for instance psychiatric medicine in order to help their patients by communicating differently with them or in astronauts, military, firemen area … The main obstacle to the expansion of this kind of technology is obviously the cost, but also find ways to integrate a battery without destroying the principle use of cloth. But I think that progress is still to come in the future…
Tachi Laboratory – Tokyo
The invisible cloth.