Five winners have their roots in Eindhoven
Eight Dutch projects each won €50,000 in the European contest organized by WEAR Sustain, with the goal to develop innovative wearables. Five of these eight have their roots in Eindhoven; Creative Ring Eindhoven played an ispeeldmportant role in the organisation of the contest. A total of 23 projects received support in this European project.
The first cohort of awardees will go on develop their proposed collaborative prototypes, which address the first Open Call for ethical or sustainable Next Generation wearable technology, smart or electronic textile prototypes. The projects will work together over a period of 6 months, starting in this month. The next Open Call will be this Autumn.
Creative Ring Eindhoven is a new initiative that aims to connect creative industries with the ‘industrial creatives’ from knowledge institutes and (technological) companies. The Ring also has hubs in in Aarhus, Barcelona, Brussels and Ghent.
The winners from Eindhoven, with their own description of the awarded project:
Constructing Connectivity (Jessica Smarsch):
We are working between design, science, and technology to create a user interaction system that engages stroke patients in rehabilitation through creativity and multi-sensory stimulation.
Meditation Lab Team (Danielle Roberts):
We collaborate to develop a framework for exploring and improving your meditation and mindfulness experience. It consists of a wearable that measures different aspects of the body and environment. This is coupled with qualitative data about the subjective meditation experience. The second part is a software framework for logging and analysing your data and an API to create different forms of output and actuation based on your data. The system can interact with the environment and optimize it for an optimal experience.
Solemaker.io (TU/e):
Solemaker.io is a platform for creating a new way to think about shoes. Instead of directly designing shoes, we generate our shoes through generative, algorithmic parametric algorithms based on usage data coming from our sensors embedded inside of the shoes. We are designing an Ultra Personalised Product Service platform where the shoes are co-used, co-designed, co-analysed and co-produced by all stakeholders including the manufacturers, designers, stylists, brands and of course the wearer. With this, we aim to create shoes that fit better physically, kinetically, aesthetically and with materials that are better for us all.
Zishi (Smart Garment for Rehabilitation):
We are aiming for smart garment systems to support rehabilitation training and help to maintain correct posture in daily life. We are designing and developing interactive wearable systems for movement and posture monitoring during upper body rehabilitation and prevention, regarding the sensing technology, system measurements, feedback conditions, system wearability and availability of clinical evidence. We focused on comfortable, functional, fashionable clothing by merging state-of-the-art sensors with textiles and providing effective and engaging feedback in different modalities.
Closed loop smart athleisure fashion (Marina Toeters):
Closed loop smart athleisure fashion is a brand new initiative. Based on previous work of Marina Toeters and Margreet de Kok. Via 3 iterations they developed a smart shirt that continuously measures the wearers’ key vital signals based on Holst Centre’s advanced printed sensor technologies on flexible substrates for textile integration. The laminated sensors are truly wearable, comfortable, robust, invisible during use, washable up to 25 cycles, and designed for unobtrusive integration in conventional fashion production. Unfortunately, the market pull is still hardly there.
This new collection will target fashionable sportive ladies at office work and right after work, they embrace forward thinking. It will be validated and disseminated in a service model in order to accelerate market pull.