In this month’s issue of Inside Business my column is on “Clothes That Are Smarter Than You.” The title—over which I had little control—is intended to grab people’s attention, but it is the subtitle that gets to the heart of the matter: “Northeast Ohio has the ability to become a center for materials and textiles that are truly smart.”

What is a “smart” material? It’s essentially a material that independently senses or controls some aspect of its/your environment. Think of hospital bed sheets that remotely provide readouts (via wireless connections to existing instruments) of critical patient data; uniforms that change camouflage appearance much the way a chameleon’s skin does. Clothing that delivers critical medications directly through the skin by sensing when they are needed, etc. Expand on this and its easy to think of systems that employ smart materials to complete complex operations in harsh environments, or places (such as inside the human body) where direct human control is simply not possible.

Local clothing manufacturer/retailer Koyono’s Jay Yoo (the first licensee of integrated clothing-based iPod controls), recently sent in this link to his own site which is more than worth checking out. He also sent this link to a company in Spain that is working on smart materials as well; the list of partners (which includes Koyono, of course!) suggests some of the possibilities smart materials holds as a field, and while early efforts such as feedback systems in running shoes that monitor your heart rate and other vital signs on your iPod, or clothing that senses and eliminates odors may seem trivial, it is out of these seemingly trivial transitions that the really major breakthroughs will ultimately come. I mean, who would have ever though of using the iPod as a heart monitor in the first place?

“What if instead of this, we…”

Since the initial meetings I referenced in the Inside Business article, a number of people from a variety of industries have come forward with their own thoughts or projects related to this emerging field, reinforcing the idea that this totally-out-of-left-field idea might just reach critical mass here in our region. But as the link to Eleksen makes clear, if we want to compete globally in smart materials, we will need to find and work with global partners as well. Some things we can and should invent here; others, though, we’d do better to simply “buy” and exploit here, applying our region’s expertise in bioscience and healthcare, polymers and advanced materials, nanotechnology, and power systems to create the next (or first?) generation of truly Smart Materials.