Flexible Sensors
Making comfortable garments with integrated durable, flexible sensors and wiring required extensive redesigning. I had to venture into unconventional materials and manufacturing processes. Existing sensors only served as single use medical devices and the relevant garment wires had been developed for space suites, so needed adapting.
I spent hundreds of hours hands-on, experimenting with different sensor combinations. When 3M tells you that they don’t make a material for your needs, you are way off in the wilderness. Even once sensors that worked had been developed in my lab, I needed to guide more work to adapt the process to work in a factory, which then required more changes and more tests at the factory to dial in for mass production.
High Tech Wires
Similarly developing wires required out of the box thinking. Wires in most consumer electronics will be flexed in a limited, controlled way, picture the wires connecting the screen in your laptop through the hinge to the motherboard. The wires in our garments would be going through washing machines, not to mention what would happen to them during a workout. Our garment designer and I looked at many possible solutions, including silver coated kevlar wires designed for the aerospace industry (they cost more than the entire budget for the garment!), and having a company make several custom designed wires. By collaborating with our suppliers and manufacturers, we were able to develop a process of integrating highly durable yet comfortable wires into a garment so that most people didn’t know they were there.
