Remember how Munnabhai topped a medical exam, with the help of Dr. Rustom who gave him instructions on the phone while the exam was on! Now such mal-practitioners can be easily noticed in a crowd of candidates. Thanks to the AwareFashion Shirt !!
AwareFashion, a shirt designed by Richard Etter, has a hidden pocket that senses nearby GSM band signals to indicate the cellphones in the proximity of the wearer.The shirt is actually a part of AwareFashion clothes line that are based on the concept of the wearer wanting to get a sense of his immediate digital environment.
When the shirt detects the switched-on cellphones in the proximity of the wearer, the small LED lights at the end of the sleeve glow up to indicate the presence of the phone that is active. How does that happen, you ask?
The basic idea comes from human sensory perception. Our sensory cells detect specific environment factors and convert them into electrical signals which are carried to the brain for processing via nerve tracts. Similarly, the shirt has a detachable pocket (on the inside) that weaves into it an antenna for detecting GSM band signals. A tiny circuit board processes the radio waves and converts them into light signals that are carried to the small LED lights (at the end of the sleeve) via flexible fiber optics.
They have used quite a practical example to explain the use of this shirt. Staff of an Opera House can use this shirt to detect the cellphones which are not switched off before the show starts. The makers say the detection range of this shirt is currently fixed but they are working on solutions to make the range customizable.
One thing that is custom in the current version of the shirt is the color of the LED light that indicates the detection of a switched-on phone. You can select yellow, white, blue, red or green lights. The Shirt is still in the concept phase, though.
There can definitely be several practical applications of it. It can also be used in Churches (before masses) to check for switched-on phones. There can be many others maybe you can suggest some innovative ones.
Hope there are more utilities to the product than just detecting the RF signals of the phone. Coz the same purpose of detecting RF signals can be met with our old cell phone light stickers as well.
(RichardEtter via UberGizmo)
