Why are fabric sensors such a hot item right now?
Think of sensors as an extension of our own senses. We have had sensors at home – temperature sensors, carbon dioxide sensors, smoke sensors etc – we are taking it to the next level, imagine sensors that can feel the pressure of your foot on your foot mat and help you with posture, with the right insert into your shoes, imagine sensors in car seats that can adjust so that your long ride to work is more comfortable, the same sensor in the car seat for an infant can be life saving if we know for sure that the seat is properly designed and properly mounted. In factories and work places, imagine your gloves being able to accurately tell where the pressure points are, how repetitious work impacts certain muscles more than others, be able to diagnose problems and correct them before you lose an arm to carpal tunnel or other. Your quality of life goes up significantly when sensors can sense what you can’t yourself and help you via tremendous computing power, quickly and accurately allow you to avoid dangers particularly those that have long term effects. In sports, being able to sense the impact to our bodies can help both with optimizing performance as well as save ourselves from long term damage, we are deploying sensors into sports gear, think helmets and shoulder pads in football and rugby, into the handles of bats and clubs. We have deployed a couple of million sensors into musical instruments to revolutionize that entire industry. In essence we are connecting us squishy humans with computers so that the us squishy humans can improve our lives by sensing what we can’t sense ourselves. Sensors are being deployed in hundreds of thousands in medical and industrial applications, in millions in musical instruments and gaming and sports, in billions in IoT and other applications
In a broader sense beyond what we do at BeBop, sensors for air quality, for autonomous cars, in buildings, in furniture, in movie theaters are all being deployed, albeit slowly but this is the future.
What are some of the things they can do?
We have designed and have commenced pilot level shipments to customers that are using it in Industrial applications (think human factors application), in sports applications, in automotive applications both in car seats as well as steering wheels, in foot pads, in musical instruments like the BopPad. We have shipped over 2 million units.
What sets BeBop sensors apart?
Sensors are traditionally rigid, they are bulky, they aren’t accurate or reliable, BeBop makes fabric based sensors that are so fast that you can use them in video games, they are so thin that you can put them in a garment and not see any difference in the thickness, they are so light that they are being added to sports gear without any appreciable increase in weight, they are accurate, they can be used for very intricate sensing and analysis.
Its an amazing technology. We start with a unique fabric that looks like any other, we coat it with our proprietary nano particles that transform the ordinary fabric to a fabric sensor, we then cut that sensor into any shape we want depending on the application (shaped like a hand for a glove application or like the foot in a pressure sensor/mat), these sensors are connected to electronics, usually via conductive inks that we print onto a flexible plastic substrate (like PET). The sensors can sense force, twist, bend and stretch, this is then conveyed super fast and accurately via the conductors to the CPU which can translate the data into information that the user can comprehend and act upon. In some applications the data is used to automatically adjust parameters in the device. We design and build everything in Berkeley and surrounding areas but the end products are typically built in Asia depending on customer application and their geographic preference.
No comments:
Post a Comment