SMART ePANTS

Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems

Intelligence Value

The SMART ePANTS program seeks to develop clothing with integrated audio, video, and geolocation sensor systems that feature the same stretchability, bendability, washability, and comfort of regular textiles. By weaving these devices directly into garments, Intelligence Community staff will be able to record information from their environment hands-free, without the need to wear uncomfortable, bulky, and rigid devices. As a result, personnel will have greater range of motion, thus improving their response time in challenging circumstances.

Summary

Active smart textile (ASTs) research is a burgeoning field where fabrics are designed to adapt and change their functionality in response to changes to their external environment and/or user input. Unlike passive smart textiles (PST), such as Gore-Tex® which rely on their structure to function, ASTs employ energy to power built-in sensors and/or actuators that sense, store, interpret, and/or react to information from their environment.

New, enabling, research to transfer many of the capabilities of rigid wearable electronics into ASTs has surfaced including: weavable conductive polymer “wires”, energy harvesters powered by the body, ultra-low power printable computers on cloth, microphones that behave like threads, and “scrunchable” batteries that can function after many deformations. In order to transfer this research into AST products, revolutionary new materials and manufacturing techniques are needed to develop complete and integrated systems containing mechanically deformable and durable: 1) power sources, 2) sensors, 3) computation and data storage, and 4) electrically conductive system component “wires” and interconnects.

The SMART ePANTS goal is to build sensor systems that are comfortably integrated into primary clothing (e.g., shirts, pants, socks, and underwear). Research committed to developing these systems will be divided into three demonstration tracks: