Ground-breaking research: Incredible clothing that senses moods and soothes
There is a garment that might know you better than you do and that will try and soothe you during times of despair. It appears the future is being fashioned through a new fashion.
During the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, two professors, Layne of Concordia University in Montreal, and Professor Janis Jefferies of the University of London presented an “intelligent” piece of clothing that can sense, through biofeedback devices woven into the fabric, our emotional state and comfort us with words, images and recordings from loved ones.
The prototype garment developed by SubTela Studio is part of an artistic project called, Wearable Absence. The clothing is embedded with wireless biofeedback sensors that detect physiological changes in temperature, heart rate, breathing, and galvanic skin response which is then sent to a database through a Smartphone connected to the internet inside the garment.
The data is analyzed and once the emotional state is determined, messages created by the wearer beforehand will display on the LED screen on the clothing through text or images and music that can be heard through the speakers in the hood of the garment. The can also store new “memories” back into the database for future use and in some way maintain a narrative of our lives.
Pre-recorded messages from friends and family members, photos, videos and music will be instantly available to sooth and comfort in times of distress. Of course the implications of these messages being heard and visible by passersby and the people we interact with everyday will certainly add an interesting dimension our every day social interactions.
From the Wearable Absence website:
Through narrative, we construct, reconstruct, in some way reinvent yesterday and tomorrow, memory and imagination fuse in the process.
Even when we create the possible worlds of fiction we do not desert the familiar but subjunctivize it into what might have been and what might be.
The human mind, however cultivated its memory or refined its recording system, can never fully and faithfully recapture the past, but neither can it escape from it. Memory and imagination supply and consume each other.American psychologist, Jerome Seymour Bruner:
This garment essentially might just enhance our life experience by enhancing our memory and boost a measure of self-knowledge by making us aware of our emotional states and responses that may escape us through our weak memories or negative imaginations.
This innovative garment not only may serve to calm us through a relayed loved ones voice but may also enrich and deepen the story we tell ourselves about who we are and who we can be.
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