Imagine, cycling jacket lighting up when you hit the brakes which might be hitting the market soon but before that Osram is planning to bring LEDs into work wear. Smart lighting into clothes will be coming soon by Osram. Also, interactive apparel interactive apparel is coming including a cycling jacket that illuminates when you hit the brakes, and lights that flash when your pulse rate rises too high according to reports.
Working with Fürth, Germany-based safety and sportswear company uvex, Osram is stitching LEDs into work jackets and safety vests. Osram’s first stab at textile illumination stops short of interactivity. Basically, it will focus on providing visibility to workers on job sites.
“The textile illumination is incorporated into the safety clothing and ensures greater visibility and hence safety in day-to-day work, for example, on construction sites or in road traffic,” Osram said. “The key advantage of the new technology: Reflector strips on conventional work clothing only reflect incident light, while the light modules ensure active illumination at all times, thus improving safety when working in the dark or in poor visibility conditions.”
The testing for this technology has been going on for a while now. The company help illuminate ice hockey players, sticks, and pucks in an outdoor night game nearly10,000 ft high in the German Alps last year.
Osram is planning to add sensors which will enable integrated LEDs to respond to physical physical stimuli, providing health alerts, safety measures, and more as part of sportswear range. “This will in the future allow various applications to be controlled using an app,” Osram said. “Possible examples include sports clothing that warns the wearer about a high pulse rate via the light guides, or a cycling jacket with an integrated brake light.”
This will be another way to apply LED lighting as “things” in the Internet of Things (IoT). Like the other companies present in the market Osram is trying to put LED lights and luminaires as nodes and backbones of information technology networks. Osram already has installed the technology at Guess and Marc O’Polo retail outlets and at shopping malls in Switzerland.
