No more dead cell phones, the t-shirt will take care of it

Chat on your mobile without worrying about running out of battery. Or enjoy the coolness of a personal air conditioner built into the undershirt. In five years, this could all be a reality. Provided that the promises of CSIRO, an Australian company that is making the electric t-shirt, are kept.

As project leader Adam Best tells the Sydney Morning Herald, the T-shirt exploits the properties of piezoelectric materials to work: “However you bend or deform this type of material, it produces electricity.” Once the t-shirt is worn it would generate current by exploiting the continuous vibrations produced by the movement of the wearer. Even the batteries could be integrated into the fabric: an item of clothing that is not very elegant would come out, but certainly very useful.

The possible uses are almost infinite: cell phones, PDAs, mini-computers, radios, portable TVs. It is an idea that also appeals to the military , one of the main financiers of the project: a soldier with a constant and lasting energy source would no longer have to worry about controlling the radio and all the electronic devices supplied. But CSIRO also thinks about the medical field, for which continuous monitoring mechanisms could be implemented: for example, patients suffering from heart diseases would benefit. (LA)