Wearable Wednesday: Meet the Wearable Tech Entrepreneurs in Luxembourg


Wearables Technologies have more and more impact on our everyday lives, from fashion to wearable devices like smart glasses or smart watches. And it’s not going to slow down soon! Steve Clement seeded an interesting serie of weekly meetings called “Wearable Wednesday” where everyone can share its knowledge, learn and develop its own project. We asked him to tell us more about this initiative and what are the hottest tech of the moment.

You launched the “Wearable Wednesday” event in Luxembourg mid-june. What is it about?

The Wearable Wednesday is all about combining technologies, not only with clothing, but combining off-the-shelf electronic components to create new and innovative projects.

We show what is available. The different sensors for example. From an affordable GPS module for Geo-Location to Ultra-Violet detection sensors to measure the intensity of the sun, we have it all to tinker with.

With simple examples, by getting a 3 coloured LED to shine, we show how easy it really is to program your own intelligent clothes.

What is the purpose of those weekly sessions? What can we learn?

The goal is to have a core group of enthusiasts who want to share their knowledge in the realm of Technologies.

I only seeded the idea to enable others to get involved in the wondrous world of Fashion and Technology. Now we are already 3 months in and quite a few members of our group have a good understanding on what it means to program an Arduino based micro-controller and develop their own projects.

The topics we cover are very diverse. From the design stage of our electronic circuit, to the actual design on our fabric needs to be considered. Plus the challenge to get it all talking together trough the code we write. Frequently we open a parenthesis on how this technology might evolve and what potential opportunities as well as risks come with it.

Mostly this is about handcrafted DYI projects, being awesome and having fun. You will enjoy the fine art of embroidery combined with sewing together your very first electric circuit.

What do you think about the wearable technologies?

They will be an integral part of our everyday life in the future. Imagining the Internet of things means that there will be a point where not only your wrist will be connected to the Internet but your shoes, scarf and why not your GPS-Enabled hat.

For me this means, understanding these disruptive and immersive technologies. It will enable people to create their own Things and who says creation says entrepreneurship and ultimately innovative products as well as companies can come out.

I wouldn’t go too crazy on reinventing the wheel here. Wearable Technologies will be a marketing spiel for, well, marketeers. The technology behind it is a shrunk down version of what you currently have in your smartphone.

Nevertheless this quasi niche would be something interesting for the Luxembourgish government to investigate. Why not have a nice big Technology incubator in the middle of our “Groussgaass”? (High-street)

Such a state funded infrastructure would attract start-ups from around the greater region. Combine this with affordable housing and you have a successful entrepreneurship scheme.

What are the hottest wearable tech of the moment?

Difficult to say. For the general public it will most probably be Smart Watches. Which is due to the cult-like following a company like Apple Inc. has created.

Plus you have two parts. On one hand you have the hardware and on the other the software. Currently the hardware is actually available, but, as with smartphones in the beginning, we lack the software. This will change rapidly with efforts like the Android Wear Developer portal which is also why we take care of the coding side of things at the Wearable Wednesday.

The hottest and most disturbing tech will be Headphones who measure your sugar-levels, blood pressure, heart rate etc. Is this really something we want to store in the cloud? Or rather, do we really want to ignore the Information Security of that data?
(http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/how-safe-your-quantified-self-tracking-monitoring-and-wearable-tech)

Other info: We do group orders from Adafruit. We are gender neutral and have only one rule: be awesome. We are Family friendly 😉 (bring your kids so they can tinker too) We support OpenHardware, OpenSourceSoftware, CreativeCommons etc. Only by sharing we can advance together.

Register for the next “Wearable Wednesday” here.

Videos:
My Lightning talk about Wearables

Links:

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