Smart fabrics are wired to the future

A new sports bra that counts heartbeats is causing a Christmas stir.

The bra, introduced this week, is the first consumer product to be based on an electronic interaction between a textile and its wearer. A special conductive fabric in the chest band, when it’s wet, picks up the heart’s electrical pulse and radios it to a digital readout wristwatch via a tiny transmitter in the bra.

Such ”smart fabrics” are the next big thing in so many fields that some analysts go so far as to predict that they’ll change the world as dramatically as the Internet did.

”The applications are limitless, and they’re for everybody,” said Spyros Photopoulos, an analyst at Venture Development Corp., a technology market-research firm in Natick, Mass. According to Photopoulos, ”hundreds” of companies, foreign and domestic, are chasing the potential of miniaturized electronics that people can wear.

By Frank Greve
Knight Ridder News Service

Full Story: http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_3314181