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USA:Smart bag to keeps your wallet safe and easily located |
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2004-11-4
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 Sufferers of mild amnesia, here is the ultimate – a smart bag named Build Your Own Bag (bYOB), constructed with computerized fabric patches designed by a team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
Building information-providing and environment-sensitive devices from the patches is as easy as playing with Lego bricks, according to designers Gauri Nanda, Adrian Cable and Michael Bove.
"We were motivated by a desire to design a system for anyone to both build with fabric in a way similar to playing with Lego and create objects that are rich with relevant context-aware computation without having to program," said Nanda, who devised the patches for a project towards a Media Arts and Sciences masters degree.
Constituting a microprocessor and memory along with a radio transmitter, a sensor reactive to light or temperature, a microphone, batteries or a display each patch has a circuit board coated in hard resin and padded with foam for protection and waterproofing within the fabric.
The four-inch square patches can then be joined together using Velcro that contains silver-coated contacts to enable electrical connectivity.
Pre-programmed patches can recognize a bag, a scarf or a pair of curtains and execute functions accordingly.
"The system was built for anyone," said Nanda, who presented the work at last week''s Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia conference in Maryland.
"Using this computer means handling soft pieces of fabric that can be ripped apart and put together with Velcro. All the technological complexities are hidden in the design and the fabric can only be connected in one way."
A radio antenna and receiver attached to the smart bag listens for signals from radio frequency identification tags attached to important objects.
A sensor detects when the bag is picked up and triggers an alarm if it doesn''t detect all the items it is programmed to recognize while light-sensing panels illuminate the contents of the bag in the dark.
The fabrics represent the latest development in "pervasive computing," the name applied to a new generation of communication and information technology that will be integrated into our environments.
While clothes and fabrics with computer chips and sensors have already been created, particularly for military and technical use, the advantage of the patches lies in their versatility, re-usability and accesibility.
Based around cheap and readily-available electrical components, they could soon be made commercially available, with bYOB retailing for around the same as an ordinary leather handbag.
Nanda said, "The danger with pervasive computing is that difficult-to-use devices are infiltrating our lives in a way that are not natural to the way we interact."
"Our approach is to put relevant applications inside everyday things such as our clothes and bags, hiding the technology and keeping the design simple yet user-configurable." |
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