Tag Archives: clothes

Clothes that can hear

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Wearable technology is a very intriguing idea that is fast in progress over the years, constantly adding new accessories and functionalities to the clothes we wear each day. This idea involves giving clothes ears or at least the same capacity as an ear. That is the plan behind the project of the “acoustic fabric” developed by MIT engineers and collaborators of the Rhode Island School of Design. This design seems a bit odd or invasive but researchers claim that it is revolutionary.

The design is highly flexible, as it can be bent in any form and of course, can be washed in the washing machine. The question we should ask however is if these clothes are necessary or if it just an unnecessary invention.

acoustic fabric

Researchers claim that the fabric can have a remarkable implication in many fields, especially medical devices. A shirt could document the heartbeat of a person with cardiac issues. They claim it can be used for the blind, used in buildings to detect cracks or strains, or even woven into fishnets to detect the sound of a fish. The fiber is designed from a “piezoelectric” material that produces an electrical signal when bent or during drastic movements, which provides a means for the fabric to convert sound vibrations into electrical signals. The fibers can also be made to generate sound, such as a recording of spoken words.

Brian Ahier on Twitter: "The t-shirt that can 'hear' your heartbeat:  Scientists develop an ear-inspired fabric that can monitor cardiac rhythm  in real time https://t.co/Ketoi3DVQP https://t.co/YMURppKXkh" / Twitter

However, I think this invention is not necessarily needed. What I mean by this is that inventors simply want to involve technology in every Sphere of human life, but I think the aspect of clothes or fashion should not necessitate technology at all. Other devices can perform the functions listed above such as helping the blind or monitoring a heartbeat of a cardiac patient and even do it better. Therefore in my opinion this is simply an invention that is not needed. The only thing I think this invention will be cool with is secretly getting a confession from a criminal as evidence. That would be interesting. Nevertheless, I agree that it is a pretty cool idea. The design is still a work in progress, however, the researchers hope to release it over the years. What’s your opinion? Do you think this invention may be revolutionary?

Sources/References

https://news.mit.edu/2022/fabric-acoustic-microphone-0316#:~:text=Caption%3A-,An%20MIT%20team%20has%20designed%20an%20%E2%80%9Cacoustic%20fabric%2C%E2%80%9D%20woven,sound%20vibrations%20into%20electrical%20signals.

https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/future-technology-22-ideas-about-to-change-our-world/

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The biggest problem of the ecommerce fashion industry

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Year by year we can observe a huge increases in fashion sales. Online sales are slowly becoming the most important part of fashion companies’ revenues. But the Internet creates kind of a wall, which is slowing the whole process and contains us from successful shopping.

In the recent years, fashion and apparel has become the fastest growing e-commerce category and the second largest after consumer electronics, growing form $375.6 billion in 2012 to $481 billion last year. Analysts predicts that the revenue will reach over $700 billion by 2022.

Buying clothes online means that we are not able to try them on and make sure the size fits us. This is why fashion companies have to struggle with a huge percentage of returned products (especially in the winter holiday season), which is something between 30-50% of the whole sales, which causes tremendously high costs connected not only with a return shipping, but also other processes needed to get the product back to the stock. Returns are growing even faster than the revenues, increasing 94.8% over the most recently measured five-year period. Moreover, over 4B pounds of returned apparel end up in landfills annually.

“What we hope to do with technology is make that growth rate slower.” Said Roger Graell, director of e-commerce at Spain’s Mango, which expects to make at least one-fifth of sales online by 2020.

Since 2012 there was plenty of startups which were trying to solve the problem with size fitting. Millions of dollars were invested in projects which were making kind of virtual fitting rooms (Avametric, Fitiquette), 3D scanners (Body Labs, Nettelo) and AI based algorithms (Virtusize, Pixibo). Most of them do not survive these days.

However, in 2016 three Ukrainian engineers created a technology, which allows people to scan their bodies using a smartphone’s camera. Their startup (called 3DLook) is implementing its technology to fashion retailers’ online stores. Thanks to that customers are able to measure themselves by taking 2 photos (from the front and from the side) and thanks to that can find out what is the perfect size for them. Technology is simply comparing customer’s measurement with producer’s size table.

3DLook claims to use advanced machine learning, AI and image processing to achieve their results. Recently, they got funding of $1 million for further development. Their technology can be a huge step forward successful apparel online shopping and, according to my research, fashion retailers hope it to be so.

And what is your opinion on this case? How many times did you buy a wrong size of some new clothes? Do you think that such technology is going to solve this problem? Let me know down below!

 

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-onlineapparel-returns-focus/online-clothing-retailers-hunt-for-better-fit-to-cut-costly-returns-idUSKCN1OK1E2

https://www.ted.com/talks/aparna_mehta_where_do_your_online_returns_go?language=en#t-98979

https://www.retaildive.com/news/forrester-online-fashion-spending-outpaces-overall-digital-sales/522227/

https://independentretailer.com/2018/12/27/ecommerces-serial-return-problem/

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/can-technology-solve-fit-problem-fashion-e-commerce

https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-fashion-industry

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/body-scanning-app-3dlook-raises-1-million-to-measure-your-corpus/

https://3dlook.me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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