Tag: wearable tech

IBM and Marchesa partnered to weave cognitive into a special dress worn at the Met Gala.

While wearable technology fashion isn’t anything new, one of the latest tech couture designs to have caught the attention of media was the light lavender dress, which featured over 100 gauzy white roses embedded with color-changing LED lights, worn by model Karolina Kurkova at last week’s 2016 Met Gala. The first-of-its-kind cognitive dress was born from a partnership between Marchesa and IBM. To create the garment, the design house used IBM’s technology and its Watson cognitive system, making it the ideal ensemble for the theme of this year’s gala which was “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.”

From smartwatches to designer dresses, wearable tech continues to spark human creativity.

From concept and research and development, to design and finished product, cognitive inspiration was woven into every step of the creative process. According to IBM’s Think blog, the collaboration showcased the creative potential of building with Watson and the technology’s ability to “enhance human imagination.”

The cognitive design of the dress depends on the combination of cognitive tools from IMB Research, Watson APIs, solution from Inno360 (Watson developer partner), and the creative vision from Marchesa’s design team.

The Wearable technology fashion changed colors based on five key human emotions.

The emotions that were selected by Marchesa, which they wanted the dress to convey, were joy, excitement, passion, curiosity, and encouragement. The belief is that color and images can indicate moods and send messages. IBM Research then fed this data into the cognitive color design tool; designed to understand the psychological effects of colors, image aesthetics and the interrelationships between emotions. This process also involved providing Watson with hundreds of images associated with the design house’s dresses so Watson could understand and learn Marchesa’s color palette.

Inno360 was then consulted to source the fabric for the garment, which needed to be made from woven textiles that would respond well to the LED technology that would be required to create the final effect. The team searched over 40,000 sources for fabric information to help it narrow down its options.

When the wearable technology fashion was finally debuted on the Met Gala red carpet, the roses on Kurkova’s dress changed colors based on the emotional responses that Twitter users had regarding the dress. Using Watson Tone Analyzer, the dress extracted context around the tone of the twitter messages. The result was the colors of the dress changed as public conversation around the Met Gala occurred online in real-time.

The MLB has now given its approval for the use of wearables throughout its current season.

The Major League Baseball (MLB) playing rules committee for the sport has now given its approval for the use of either of two different wearable technology devices during the games throughout the current playing season.

The two wearable devices that have received the MLB’s approval aren’t exactly the usual Fitbit.

Instead, the first is the Motus Baseball Sleeve, which is wearable technology for gauging stress to the elbows of a player. The second is the Zephyr Bioharness, which monitors breathing and heart rates of the players. Aside from those two, the committee has also gone ahead to give their approval for a couple of sensors for the baseball bats. Those bat sensors are to be used on the field during workouts, as opposed to during the games themselves. The first of the sensors is from Blast Motion while the second is from Diamond Kinetics.

The goal is to use wearable technology to identify player habits that may eventually lead to injuries.

That said, the players union has expressed some concern with regards to the use of wearables and maintaining player privacy. It wants to ensure that the information collected by the teams will respect the privacy of the players. Both sides of this discussion have agreed that there will need to be talks throughout the bargaining that will occur this year.

At the time of the writing of this article, none of this information had been officially announced. Instead, people with knowledge of this subject were willing to share what they knew with the media in exchange for anonymity.

Technically, this is not the first time the sleeve wearable tech received approval. Last year, the committee gave provisional approval for that device. That said, this does represent the first time that full consent was given for the use of this or any other wearable device by the MLB.

The committee that gave the approval for the wearable technology device use consisted of Chris Antonetti from Cleveland, John Schuerholz from Atlanta, Terry Ryan of Minnesota, and John Mozeliak from St. Louis.