When you meet someone and shake hands, you're sharing information: it's a friendly gesture that means a desire for social interaction. However, in the future, such gesture can be used to share everything from your name and last name to your contact address. And that's thanks to a new generation of smart clothing that will allow you to exchange data and activate devices using sensors and integrated circuits. It's a technological advance that will drive what's called invisible computing. And two researchers at the University of California just gave it a new push.

What is smart clothing?

Wearables are all those electronic devices that can be carried as an extension of our body. This includes sports bracelets, smart watches and even smart contact lenses. By definition, smart clothing is the ultimate in clothing. After all, if something is done, it is usually clothes.

Some examples of smart clothing:

• Pajamas with sleep monitoring capabilities.
• Footwear or socks with built-in pedometer.
• Belts with warning systems in working environments.
• T-shirts that measure heart rate.
• Haptic clothing for people with deafness.
• Jackets with integrated heat capacity and thermostats.
• Clothes that speak to each other.

So far, all right, but then comes the real world where daily use, washing and the ravages of time make it a challenge to integrate fragile electronic devices. According to researchers at the University of California who have just presented their new prototype of smart clothing, the key is simplification. And it's creating a new NFC standard.

The system they have chosen is flexible, durable and without battery. To achieve this, they have used modified copper and aluminum sheets for magnetic induction surgery. Thanks to the treatment applied, they can send signals up to a meter away, unlike current NFC technologies, which have a range of less than three inches. The modification of these metals makes them metamaterials, that is, elements with capacities radically different from the original ones.

The research team emphasizes that magnetic induction releases continuous circuits throughout the garment. For example, it is possible to integrate these meshes into existing garments so that the pants can measure the number of steps and a t-shirt can measure heart rate. It also makes it easy for the garments of two different people, whether the sleeves of a shirt or gloves, to communicate with each other.

An unprecedented approach: portable touch devices enabled for AI

While it is true that smart clothing applications are promising, they must compete with other portable devices. For example, if someone uses a smartwatch that measures their pulse, they are likely to release a t-shirt that offers similar functionality. That’s why researchers are still looking for innovative applications to make the leap into mass-adopted smart clothing.

One of the most exciting applications in this regard comes from MIT labs in the United States. Their focus has been to develop smart tactile clothing, that is, clothing that captures the movements of a person's whole body. This would go from twisting an arm to bending it or stretching it.

The prototypes they have developed use conventional textile fibers combined with specially modified pressure sensitive fibers that function as sensors. So the smart garment doesn't have isolated sensors, it becomes a sensor in its entirety. The garments that have been presented include socks that monitor the steps or a t-shirt that monitors all movements or contact surfaces. And all in washable and flexible garments.

The fact that sensors are distributed throughout the garment also reduces the impact of wear. Thus, anticipating that any part of the garment will stop issuing signals, inventors have reinforced their technology with an AI system that detects the problem and automatically adjusts the interpretation of the data.

Researchers believe that this innovative smart clothing technology could have interesting applications in sports training, correcting bad postures or rehabilitating patients. They even suggest that these garments might teach robots to move in different situations.