The Future Of... Clothes

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>> Sumi Das: We wear clothes to keep us warm, protect us from the sun and, of course, look good, but in the future our apparel could do more than that. Turning our clothes into electric chargers for our personal electronics.

Music At the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Li-Wei Lin and his team are trying to make clothes more intelligent. Outfitted with the latest technologies, his lab is working on a way to intertwine electric generators into clothing fibers, so one day we'll be able to harvest energy through our normal body movements.

>> Li-Wei Lin: The idea is that a human is very efficient in terms of energy generation. We eat food and exercise, so our long-term goal is that since humans are so efficient and we still need to move and when we want to scavenge the energy out of a human, one way is to actually put in the energy generation into the clothes.

>> Sumi Das: It starts by creating nano electric fibers so small, they're invisible to the naked eye. This is the foundation for Lin's nanogenerator. Today, he's testing how to generate electricity through simple hand movements.

>> Li-Wei Lin: My student is going to move his hand so you can see the movement of the hand is actually going to generate a current, and so when he moves this way, the current will generate in one direction and when he moves the other way around, current will be coming from the other direction.

>> Sumi Das: Lin estimates by just walking, the clothes people wear might be able to produce enough power keep their mobile phones continually charged. On the other side of San Francisco Bay, cross-town rival Stanford University is also developing new materials to power clothing. Yi Cui is an assistant professor at Stanford. He's experimenting with combining common cloth with nano-infused ink.

>> Yi Cui: We are trying to code nano materials onto textiles, such as cotton cloth.

>> Sumi Das: This how it works. Cui dips the cloth into the conducting ink. He then takes the fabric and bakes it in the oven. Once it's dry, he's able to measure the charge using a multimeter. He then assembles it into a battery and tests it out.

>> Yi Cui: Let's see whether this textile battery works. So, this is LED. You see the red color coming out from this LED? It lights up this LED. It's a battery.

>> Sumi Das: Cui hopes eventually the materials technology will be embedded into clothes and act as an energy storage device for your personal electronics. The future of clothes: making wired garments the perfect fit for the digital age. For SmartPlanet, I'm Sumi Das.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====