Dutch fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht has introduced a 3D printed garment called the Synapse Dress, which can sense your heart rate as well as your emotions.
The dress is a product of Wipprecht's collaboration with designer Niccolo Casas and Materialise, and it makes use of the Intel Edison chip that Wipprecht introduced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, according to CNET. The chip works with sensors to light up LEDs in the dress based on stimuli from the wearer's body.
Measuring brain activity and heart rates is possible thanks to the addition of a special headpiece that uses Electroencephalography (EEG) and Electrocardiography (EKG) in the bodice. This technology is used to measure the wearer's level of attention, or "focus," in what she is looking at, as well as set the LEDs to light up. A camera in the bodice can take a picture when the wearer's attention gets to 80 percent, providing a photo of whatever caused her emotion at the time.
The Synapse Dress also comes with a sensor that measures how close other people are to the wearer and can shine up to 140W when people get too close to the wearer and make her feel uncomfortable, Ubergizmo reported.
The sensor data can also be shown through voice command.
Wipprecht said she was previously unable to obtain data from wireless bio signals because the micro controllers she would use were either too bulky or couldn't process enough power, CNET reported.
"This means they are hard to integrate into fashion," she said.
Wipprecht added that with the help of the Edison chip, she can now "integrate a super small piece of technology which can quickly compute complicate sets of signals, on-board storage and interconnect wirelessly to a lot of input data at once in a more advanced and intelligent way, to run my designs."
