Winter's haute couture: Bluetooth jacket

BANGALORE: Here's news to warm the hearts of gizmo freaks and the fashion conscious this winter. As part of its technology development in the realm of "wearable electronics," Germany based semiconductor company Infineon Technologies, along with two retailers European sportswear majors O'Neill and Rosner, has debuted a snowboarding jacket that is Bluetooth enabled.

With in-built functions like MP3 player, a microphone and Bluetooth mobile telephony, this piece of sports gear dubbed "the HUB" clearly makes a hi-tech fashion statement by flaunting its chips on its sleeve (literally)!

Woven into the HUB are electrically conductive fabric tracks that connect the chip console to a fabric keyboard and built-in speakers in the helmet. The chip module contains a full-featured MP3 player and a Bluetooth module via which the wearer can control a mobile phone. If you want to make a phone call, the stereo system acts as the headset. The microphone is integrated in the collar of the jacket. To select a song from the music menu, all that the user needs to do is press a button on the control pad on the sleeve.

This cool jacket can withstand the rough and tumble of not just snowy terrain, but also that of the washing machine. According Dr. Christoph Kutter, who heads the Secure Mobile Solutions group at Infineon, "Our idea was to integrate electronics onto clothes while making it possible to get it in and out of the washing machine. While getting the chips was the easy part, the challenge for the team lay in assembling and packaging the chips."

Obviously, the high-tech jacket also comes with a fancy price tag- around $630 and one can buy it over the Internet.

While this sartorial technology experiment may seem like a flimsy idea to many, future possibilities cannot be ruled out. Dr Kutter reckons that soon it may be possible to have in-built sensor chips within T-shirts to monitor the heart and other vital signs in the body.

Another interesting futuristic idea that Infineon is working on involves a "thinking carpet" that could handle "intelligent" functions such as controlling alarm, climate control, controlling lights or fans and even security.

So what could be next? Thinking furniture?