Ep. 63: Microsoft: Making smart textiles a reality Ankit Podcast

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Ep. 63: Microsoft: Making smart textiles a reality

This week’s guest on The WTiN Podcast is Teddy Seyed, a senior researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft.

Speaker 1: WTiN
Speaker 2: Teddy Seyed

Speaker 1
Hello, my name is Jessica Owen, and I am the Deputy digital editor at WTiN. And this is the WTiN podcast. Join me and my guests every week as we talk about new and interesting innovations from across the textile and apparel industry. Whether it's talking to sustainable startups quizzing experts on latest research and development, or chatting to companies about their most recent products, you can rest assured that the WTiN podcast will connect you with everything you need to know. This week, I am joined by Teddy Seyed, who is a senior researcher in the RiSE group at Microsoft. In this episode, Teddy talks about some of his latest research concerning gesture sensing and object recognition, smart textiles, challenges, such as scale deformation and interdisciplinary teaching, and how we'd love to create Ironman suit if we had unlimited resources. Hello, Teddy, thank you for joining me today, I'm excited to have the chance to talk to you actually see what Microsoft is up to. So how are you? How is life in Seattle?

Speaker 2
I am well thanks, Jessica, for having me. Here today. Life is great in Seattle. weather is warm, no complaints. I mean, other than the pandemic, which is hopefully soon, I think we're good.

Speaker 1
Yeah, I think that's the same for all of us, isn't it? So you are a senior researcher at Microsoft Damn, which must be a very interesting role. So tell me a bit about yourself, then. I mean, what's your background? And what sort of research areas you interested in?

Speaker 2
Yeah. So I mean, yeah, obviously, I'm a senior researcher here at Microsoft Research in the rights group. In terms of my background, yeah, I did a PhD in Canada, obviously, the first entrepreneurial PhD in Canada. So what that means is, I did a number of startups in my PhD, obviously, some of them successful, some of them not. But the whole point of it was to learn and understand how you can merge research. So for example, you know, building a smartwatch with commercialization. So you know, how do you find the partners? How do you manufacture it? How do you make a business plan and things like that? So I emerged a lot of those two streams together. And then yeah, fast forward a couple years later, having done some work in wearables, a lot of the work now that I do Microsoft research is in the wearable space. Right?

Speaker 1
Well, that's interesting. I mean, we'll come on to it later. But a lot of people say that there's a disconnect, isn't there between perhaps like r&d and commercialization? So doing a degree like that must have just set you up perfectly?

Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I came in to Microsoft, research with, you know, a pretty unique skill set, and it's definitely been helping me so far. But that's not to say like, doing both is quite hard. Because you're merging, I guess two different minds, right. Like, there's a tension between product and research where, you know, that, let's say like, I'm, you know, working on a textile. At what point is that good enough research? And you know, how far should they continue along that path to then commercialise it right? Because commercially, I'll take another, take it to another direction entirely, which might not be comfortable with research. So sometimes there's a tension between the two sides. But it's fun. It's fun. I really like it.

Speaker 1
Yeah, it sounds like such a great field to sort of be and I imagine every day is very interesting for you.

Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Especially with the pandemic and trying to do textiles, which are very tangible. Right. So

Speaker 1
yeah, well, before the school, you were saying that you're primarily working from home, but you get to go in every now and then. So, I mean, how have you found working with the pandemic? And sort of balancing that?

Speaker 2
Yeah, it's been it's been interesting, right, there's a lot more emphasis, you know, because they work from home. The social aspect is very, very important, right? Because I don't go into the office and see people every day anymore. And there's the aspect of, you know, from building a piece of electronics or working on, you know, a PCB or working on textiles. That's a very tangible thing, right. So, you know, having my own lab set up in my house now, which is not the most ideal thing, and I've had to move around, and it makes things pretty hectic. But yeah, I mean, other than that, the social aspects whose, as I mentioned, is quite important. We don't have it as much now. So I'm definitely missing that side of things. 

Speaker 1
Well, as we said, fingers crossed, things should hopefully start opening up again later this year. But we'll just have to wait and see. Now tell me then, I mean, we don't really need to introduce Microsoft, because I'm pretty sure most people are familiar with the business and its products. But tell me why such a huge company, primarily a computer company is interested in smart textiles, then. 

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, if you think of the broader scope of Microsoft, right, Microsoft goal is really to empower its customers. So that's sort of our company ethos. But in terms of the research side, right, there's a lot of interesting work you can do with textiles, right? Whether it's, you know, sensing biometrics on the body You know, coming up with interesting examples of you know, so let's take COVID, right, we have the pandemic going on now, people are stressed. And often we can't tell people are stressed through through video. So imagine we have, you know, a team's call, and you know, someone on the team is called stressed. And I can't tell that someone on my call stress, but if we had, you know, a shirt, with some sensing and textiles in it, that could sense that was stressed. And I would know, as someone in the meeting that you're stressed, and I could take you aside and say, Hey, how are things going? Right? So oh, there's these really interesting, you know, examples of things we could do with textiles and wearables in general, that are really missing in a space right now. So for Microsoft, we're definitely interested in in that type of thing, empowering our customers, both from you know, like, let's say, the Nikes, or Chanel's or the world to the end consumer as well.

Speaker 1
Well, that's interesting. I mean, I think I came across a product a few months ago, or a company, I want to, I want to say their call centres, or I think we did actually did a podcast with him. And I think, again, they were going down the route of trying to somehow detect whether it's through your heartbeat or things like that, your mood, your stress levels, and in showcasing that to everyone else, it's a very interesting concept.

Speaker 2
There's lots of those applications that are available. You know, and really, Microsoft's job is to empower that for basically everybody, not just the one off, I mean, you've as you've mentioned, you've probably even seen, if you've Googled stuff, with wearables, there's a lot of really interesting one off wearable things. But then it's very hard to scale these things, both from the perspective of a manufacturer to the end consumer as well. So the role of Microsoft, obviously, is to empower this entire ecosystem and make it a reality. And my personal goal is, you know, to, to make wearables the real thing, right? I mean, we have, you know, one of my favourite movies that actually got me into all of this was Ironman, right? Where I man has this, like, super close, and just like these AR things going on, right? But there's a really cool wearable interaction. So I'm like, trying to enable those type of things through a lot of this work, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1
I can understand why film like that would inspire you. I mean, it seems so you know, futuristic, but I guess the technology is somewhat there. It just takes the imagination, then the know how the technology in just one day combining all those things for it to happen. Yeah,

Speaker 2
I mean, this, this is why I like the research entrepreneurship path, right? Where the research side of Teddy, and even general research side really sees the cutting edge side of things, right. But then what's missing is that entrepreneur pieces like how do I make this? Not one Iron Man suit? But how do we make like 100,000 Iron Man suits, right? Or you take it, like a shirt that like changes colour, you know, during the day or like adapts to your mood, right? Like, how do I make 100,000 of them? Right? That's where the entrepreneur comes in. So I like being on the cutting edge, and then also trying to make it a reality. So it's not just futuristic, but like futuristic and real. So

Speaker 1
I mean, when did Microsoft start looking into smart textiles? And when did they start investing in this area? Because, I mean, clearly, I mean, I thought it was only recently, but I mean, has it been going on for some time now? And I've just clearly been away with the fairies?

Speaker 2
Oh, no, no, that's a great point. Great question. So Microsoft, I think, generally has been doing a lot of smart textile work for the last I would say, since, honestly, 2014 2015. We've been doing work in that space. And there were a few groups and Microsoft that were doing it. And then we're most recently, you've kind of come across the work that I've been working on, since I joined here. But it's been going on, I guess, steadily for a little while. And it's just I mean, there's obviously a lot of things we work on internally that don't go outside of the company. But it's there's work there for sure. Well,

Speaker 1
I mean, that leads us nicely on actually because there's a couple of projects that I've noticed that Microsoft and yourself have been working on. One of which is called capacity, though. I mean, this looks very cool. From what I understand you've developed a fabric that can recognise objects placed on it. So can you tell me a bit more about this and how it works?

Speaker 2
Yeah, so capacity row is, is obviously it's not just me, it's a collaboration with a lot of great colleagues and interns in Dartmouth College, and on the east coast, the United States. And so what capacity was about is just, I mean, as you mentioned, it's object recognition on fabric, right? So imagine, you know, placing a cup, or you know, fork or any other type of object on a piece of fabric and knowing what that is touching. So you're probably wondering why something like that is interesting, right? So there's a lot of interesting use cases. So for example, imagine if someone was blind and had gloves. And the gloves could detect the object that it was touching. So you could you could grasp the object also know the thing you're touching. So if you grabbed a golf Coke, or glass of water or a glass of milk, you would know the difference, because your gloves could tell you because you have a piece of fabric that detects where it's touching, right?

Speaker 1
So I mean, how does that work? Then? What's in this material that can detect detect all these different things? Yeah,

Speaker 2
so we made a custom prototype. There's a number of electrode grids in the in the fabric that are conductive, right and you make an area of sensitivity and use some clever machine learning techniques to basically determine the what the object is.

Speaker 1
And I say a case of just spending time sort of placing different objects on the material so that it learns it then does that how it works.

Speaker 2
There's, there's an element of the training module, right? So you have to train the fabric to detect things. It's very much like a standard machine learning approach where you, you train a model enough times that it knows that specific thing. And the way the sensor works is, it's sensitive enough to know the difference between an apple and orange a fork and other objects. Obviously, it's just a research project right now. But you can imagine over time, if you train more models to think can detect, you know, pretty significant amount of different objects.

Speaker 1
I mean, how accurate is it then? And can it sense things? Like within seconds? 

Speaker 2
Yeah, it's, it's fairly, fairly accurate. You know, one of the with research, we don't have to go beyond this right now. For example, it's a 94.5%, accuracy rate 20 different objects. But obviously, with the research, you know, the whole point of this was to prove the concept. And obviously, the next stage is to make it you know, far more robust, you know, shrink some of the hardware, figure out how the this could actually be manufactured, etc, etc. But for the most part, we can we can definitely what you're talking about.

Speaker 1
So as it stands, then what sort of components are we looking at? Is it for example, a tablecloth that looks like it's connected to a battery pack in a system? I mean, I'm trying to picture it.

Speaker 2
Yeah. So it's right now it's, you can imagine a flat piece of fabric, there's a layer inside that has some of the customer micro grids, which are then connected to a small piece of or not small, but decently sized piece of electronics, which then plugs into a computer, and then the computer sort of processes anything that goes on that fabric reader, and then does the machine learning and then detects what the object is. And then I was put that somewhere, for in our demo, we just had it on the screen to say like, this is the thing. You could imagine that going to another thing.

Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, I think so. So you said there that there would be a next stage. So what are we looking at to further improve this, then what what sort of things needs to be done to develop it?

Speaker 2
Yeah. So I mean, one of the challenges with smart Textiles is how do you get out of that world? Right? So it's pretty easy to make one of these many one offs, as I mentioned earlier, but then what's the process with like, with a supplier? Right? How do you create a process that they can then take and repeat over hundreds of 1000s of times? Right? It was very hard to do 1235 for this research, but then what are we going to change in our process? So for example, we had a custom pattern that we made, we were placing on the fabric for you manually, but then to make that scale, we need to change that approach, right? And just even changing that then changes the sensitivity of the sensor. So then how does that affect our models? You know, so there's a domino effect for everything. And then not only that, once we figured that site out, then how does it work? Again, as I mentioned, in the supplier chain of things, right, how do they take this on? And even if they take it on, how do we ensure that they're empowered enough to know that this sensor is working or not? Right, because they don't have experience with machine learning or any of the technical side of things? So there's a lot of runner work coming up?

Speaker 1
Right? I mean, are you optimistic? Do you think it can be done?

Speaker 2
I absolutely think it can be done. Right. Okay. 

Speaker 1
That's interesting to know, then, I mean, I'm not sure how widely spread sort of how many people know about this project. But have you had much interest in it is, is there a commercial opportunity here? Perhaps, companies getting in contact, you know, being quite interested and nosy about it?

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I would say generally, there's a lot of interest in the smart textile and fabric work that we do the really the challenge is pulling in the right companies, right. So for example, even if we had made a smart fabric, who is the, you know, the product partner, or the customer that's going to be interested in this is going to be a company like Nike, or Chanel, or Puma or, you know, pick up any other apparel brand, right? And if we do that, then what is it going to look like for them to take this on? Right? So that that figuring that part out is really where the challenge is with a lot of the wearable stuff today. And

Speaker 1
so just hypothetically speaking, then, would these companies buy, I don't know, the rights or the technology from you? And it would be purely something that they would then go on developer? Would it always be a collaboration between Microsoft and the company interested?

Speaker 2
Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, I'm still sort of working on that answer, I would say, at a high level, but for the most part, we're, we're this is just research right now. I haven't we haven't gotten past that stage yet. Okay.

Speaker 1
A bit of a, an early question to be asking you that. Okay, so another intriguing project that I came across is called Fabrizio, lot of Italian words here. I mean, I think they're Italian derived anyway,

Speaker 2
that for a lot of our projects, geo at the end. 

Speaker 1
So I understand that this is all about gesture sensing. So do you mind expanding on that then just sort of telling us a bit more about this project?

Speaker 2
Yeah. So if you imagine you know, If you've seen there's been a few smartphones that have used gesture sensing. So I think Google has done a couple of them with solely where you do a gesture over the phone and detects what's going on. Yeah. Have you seen that type of phone?

Speaker 1
No, I'm imagining something like the, what was it called the X Xbox Kinect or something like that, that's

Speaker 2
very similar. The Kinect is full body, right? So it looks at your entire skeleton, it knows your arms and legs and things like that. And you can do gestures, and then wave your arms around, do different motions and detect what's going on. But you can take that concept now and scale it down to fabric. But instead of having a camera, you know, have a sort of sensor in in the actual fabric that's an antenna woven into it, or I guess embroidered, and then you're sending signal through it. And then based off of what's above it, you can detect different gestures. And you don't have to touch the fabric. You can do things like pinching, rotating your finger, things like that. And it'll know. Right,

Speaker 1
okay, interesting. So, so again, what are the sort of applications of developing a technology such as this?

Speaker 2
Yeah, that's a that's a great question. So a lot of that stuff we looked at, you know, hands free interaction, right? So imagine you have a car, right? So there's a lot of cars with fabrics in them, right? You're driving and maybe you don't want to touch the screen panel or something, you can wave your hand above something, or you can do a gesture to change some control, versus having to like touch the touch screen. I mean, so BMW, I believe, has some work in their cars right now with gestures using camera based things, that there's an opportunity, obviously, with the fabric in the car to do this type of work. Or if your hands are occupied with objects, you can do gestures above, you know, some type of fabric in use something interesting.

Speaker 1
I mean, I think I read another application, if this was something that you could, you know, secretly pocket dial or something through.

Speaker 2
Is that right? Yeah, a cool example that we had, but yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1
I mean, there seems to be a lot of interesting things that I mean, I would just never think of myself, but it's so what stage is this project project at then? Is it similar to capacity, though? Yeah,

Speaker 2
it's similar, where we publish it, and we sort of moved on to something, I guess, more unique down the road. We're just a lot of this work. We're just really exploring what we can do with. So a lot of the like, a lot of this research is, what can we do that's unique with textiles? What sensing can we add? So we add it, we do a lot of work on machinery inside to validate that this technique works. And then we come up with a couple of interesting examples. And then moving forward, we then look at what is the commercial side of this thing where, you know, how do we take this to a partner, or customer? And what would they want to do with it, right? Even in this space of wearables, I often get asked, you know, what is what is the idea of wearable? And I always answer with my job as researcher and entrepreneur, an entrepreneur is not to answer that question, my job is to empower you to explore that

Speaker 1
Microsoft, then you give him pretty much free rein. If you come up with an idea, you can just get on with it. Do the exploring develop it? And I mean, have you got quite a lot of freedom there?

Speaker 2
Yeah, so Microsoft research is very, I mean, we're open to doing lots of different things. Right? So you have a lot of blue sky researchers who do you know, we explore whatever we think is interesting. Right? So I do a lot of smart textile work, I go out, you know, I we find the textile partners, we companies, interesting prototypes, who do the user research, you know, we ask people like questions. But with this techniques, you know, we do all those things that you wouldn't need to do for a research paper. And then it's up to me as a researcher, then to look at, you know, product interest, whether it's inside the company or outside the company, but for the most part, it's very blue sky and open, we can work on whatever we want to work on.

Speaker 1
sounds incredible. I think that everyone would be envious of a job with that much freedom.

Speaker 2
I love it. So yeah. 

Speaker 1
So I mean, are there any other interesting projects that you've worked on? I mean, I think I read that you've created sensing scarves and a mother daughter dress. I mean, can you talk me through any of these?

Speaker 2
Yeah, so I mean, you've so far, we've talked a lot about the, I guess, the research side of things, right, which is where capacity bow and for the CIO and a few others come into play. But as I mentioned, there's a lot of freedom to do different things. Right. And so one of them that we looked at was, you know, making an actual wearable scarf that could sense the environment and like, warm you up or cool you down. So we actually went through an entire cycle of, you know, the concept with the pattern and the sketch, you know, picking out a specific design, we integrated, some might sound simple LED lights, but it took a while to figure out how to get that integrated at the manufacturing stage, and then producing some of the software for it. And sort of the next stage of that is actually getting them to communicate with each other. You know, I mean, ideally, when COVID is finished, you know, you can wear one of these scarves, and all these guys communicate with each other and do something super, super cool. Basically, that's, that's one aspect. And then I also do I've also done a lot of work, you know, fashion shows, especially in Canada, working on like the mother daughter dresses, you mentioned where, you know, there's a relationship obviously between the mother and her daughter, you know, as the child grows up, you know, the dress can kind of respond and everything like that side of my work because that that that type of work is really about the design and the story right? At this point, every garment, whether we realise it or not, you know, we go out into the world. And we're making a statement about ourselves or something about ourselves. In that there's a, there's a unique aspect of storytelling where this technology is almost secondary, and it's serving to the purpose of the story trying to tell. And that's sort of why I work on that a lot. Now, you're probably wondering why that's important. Well, for me, a lot of the wearable stuff actually should be driven by the space of fashion and apparel, right? They're very good at storytelling. They are the, the curator of the story of the consumer, right, like, it's the Pumas and Nikes, and Chanel's and all those brands who dictate what we wear and know what we want to wear and what statements we want to make. Right. And so it should be technology serving those stories versus technologies, telling the story itself, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1
No, it definitely does. And I mean, I guess I wanted to talk about sort of challenges surrounding the smart textile sector later on, but I mean, you've just brought up this topic of being designed, let it and I think that's one of the ways in which smart textiles will only be adopted by consumers as if it actually doesn't interfere with what they would normally wear or normally buy. 

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the, this whole space is very interdisciplinary, right. And often, the challenge that I face is teaching, right? It's in teaching means understanding, you know, where the challenges are in the pipeline for smart textiles, what skills are needed for it. So for example, with being designed lead, there's that design for that world means something different in technology, right. And sort of transiting between those two worlds is often very difficult. And it takes quite some time. So for example, I'm working with, you know, designer right now to come up with a collection using some of the Microsoft technology. And we're going through the cycle of teaching. So I'm teaching a lot of what the technology can do or can't do, what the limitations are, because design is very open minded, and effectively limitless, which is the way it should be. But with technology, we have a lot of limits, right? Even if we're trying to develop something new. So finding a middle ground, and then developing something is one of the main challenges I face with a lot of this smart textile work.

Speaker 1
I can imagine. I mean, I was having a discussion with someone recently about these new knitting machines and how digitalized they've become, and that there's a lack of skilled people, you know, what to do with them in order to make all the cool products that they are capable of making? So it sounds like it's a very similar situation here.

Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had done a research paper a couple of years ago, talking about sort of the process of creating a garment that was like a fashion tech garment. Right. And I think, in it I mentioned, half of the work is really this teaching aspect where if you're a designer, or someone who hasn't even seen AR, if you don't even know what augmented reality is, I mean, it's going to be hard for you to create something with it. Right? Don't have if you haven't used any of the design tools that are very technical. I mean, it's gonna be hard for you to come up with something, right. So a lot of it is like the language and teaching that needs to be overcome before much of this space can move forward. Interesting.

Speaker 1
So I mean, I know you're doing teaching, but for those who don't have access to you, I mean, is this a an opportunity for, say, universities and textile schools to you know, maybe rejigged their syllabuses, to start thinking about this, the future of the industry? Because it does seem or when you look at the market reports that eventually things like smart textiles, and out there will become quite a big part of our future.

Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I think every school should have a wearable technology programme, if it doesn't already. And not just that, it shouldn't be a wearable technology, I guess, discipline that only like, it shouldn't only be coming from computer science or engineering. Because actually, in the future, I believe it's going to be a very interdisciplinary thing you're going to need to have experience with design and like pattern making, and also on the technical side with a bit of computer science, maybe you'll do programming, maybe you won't, but it would be good to have some of those skill sets up front. But very, like it shouldn't be in one department and like that, it should be a cross disciplinary thing.

Speaker 1
Well, that's interesting. You say that, actually, because I think smart Textiles is definitely what you say, an interdisciplinary sector. I mean, you and Microsoft clearly have the technological know how, but are there any areas that you're less knowledgeable in? And therefore you have to seek out different people who have got those skills?

Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so, for example, I'm not a I'm not a fashion designer at all. Right? I don't I don't do any of the any of the pattern drafting. I don't do any of the manufacturing any of those type of things. So that is an area that, you know, I sort of learned trying to learn every day. That is a critical aspect of all of this, right? Because it's not, it's not just technology. It's an entire space that's changing, right? We're pulling in sensing, we're putting in machine learning, we're putting in textiles we're putting in electronics, right and so not everyone is ever going to have a But no one can be Superman here and know everything. So it has to be a bunch of different techniques and skill sets that put it all together.

Speaker 1
So I mean, again, I mean, what's holding the industry back in terms of technology? I mean, when I, you know, do a bit of research online, it looks like, batteries is quite a big issue. People want to, you know, just make everything tiny so that it doesn't interfere with products. I mean, is that the sort of things that he's holding back in terms of technology, then?

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a number of many, as you mentioned, batteries is one of the main ones, right? There's flexible batteries that exist, but are they ready for mass consumption? Right? Can we shrink the electronics to something that's reasonable based off the batteries? And then in terms of electronics? Can we make things washable, right? Wash ability is one of the biggest challenges with a lot of this stuff. So even if you put electronics to garment, and you make it semi washed, but what happens if someone like forgets to take the electronics out? And they wash it, and they ruin it? Right? That's child, or, you know, in the case of Deckard from Google, when it first came out, I think you could only do like six or seven washes, right, which is not a huge amount. But over time, that might not work, right? So can we maintain, you know, sensor accuracy of things that are smart? And then even taking a step back? I think, you know, for me as an entrepreneur, so this is Teddy, the entrepreneur at Microsoft speaking, I think, you know, this space is moving very quickly. And it's also blocked. Because, you know, there's a lot of companies doing interesting work in sensors and textiles, but how do they, how do they work with a partner, like Puma or Nike, or Chanel, or Louis Vuitton, right, they don't really do a lot of that work. So I feel like there's a lot of fashion companies and you know, apparel companies that want to do wearables that don't have the expertise. And I also feel like there's companies that do a lot of sensing work, that have some expertise, but then putting it all together in the entirety of the space is really what's holding it back. So I feel like there's a lot of different things that are that are blocked right now. And putting it together is is going to be the challenge.

Speaker 1
Considering all that there are a few companies that have managed to do this somehow, or at least managed to get to a stage where they can at least, you know, launch their company. So I think off the top of my head there's, I think, I think it's another Canadian company called Myint. There's a company in the UK called footfalls in heartbeats. I think they're doing like sensing socks and knee sleeves. So I mean, what's your opinion on these companies? Then? Quite impressive. got to that stage?

Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely familiar with my entire music, since they're Canadian. I'm Canadian. Long. Yeah, for a while. So they've been doing some pretty great work. I think the challenge is a lot of this, as I mentioned, is scaling it, right? scaling it in a meaningful way. Getting into the hands of consumers, you know, finding compelling use cases for it, right? Because a lot of the time with technology is you build an interesting piece of technology, and then you're trying to find a use case for it. Right, and so is the other way around for a lot of things. So I think that's kind of also what's holding all of these things back. So at least for the work that I do, and try and work directly with, you know, a company or a couple of companies to figure out what they're actually trying to do, and then build a story, build something around it, which is where the story aspect comes in. 

Speaker 1
So I mean, imagine if you've managed to pull all these things together, then that we've talked about? Where do you think the interest from the market is going to come from? Or we may be thinking medical applications potentially gaming? Or? Or is it the fashion side of things?

Speaker 2
My guilty pleasure is the fashion world to be, it's just because it's so interesting. And, you know, I like fashion, just because there's a lot of different stories that are being told with garments. And that's just a huge part of the things that I do. I really like design, thinking and design things in general. But I guess the broader, you know, your broader question, you know, obviously, medical is a huge, huge space. Right. And, you know, with clothing and sensors, that's obviously I think, the best place where you can measure biometric data and have something meaningful happen, right? So having knows that I'm actually stressed and is accurate, which I think would be really valuable, both for myself, and maybe for my doctor. Gaming is obviously another one. That's huge. And that's definitely an area of interest for some things that I'm working on right now. There's obviously the military aspect as well. So yeah, there's a there's a number of interesting areas that we could work in. I just think this space is just huge. And part of the problem is like I I think of like all of this is really everything right? Fashion is everything. It's in everything we do. We do it, we look at it every day. Right? That is a trillion dollar industry. So I think if you can figure that out, that's probably a really good career.

Speaker 1
Yeah, that's probably where the money lies. So another question that I wanted to ask you about is whether sustainability is considered when making smart textiles. I mean, this is a huge topic being tackled at the moment. And if smart textiles are to take off, surely it's made it'd be easier to tackle the sustainability side now then perhaps looking down looking down the line when perhaps there's more regulation on fashion and so on. So I mean, what's what's your take on that, then?

Speaker 2
Yeah, no, that's an excellent, excellent question. I mean, I think with with sustainability, right, it's a lot of it is really about the supply chain, right? How suppliers are doing things, where are we sourcing, the materials, things like that. And then you're right now is really the time to think about sustainability in smart textiles. So, you know, when I, when we try to work on a lot of these things, we're, you know, we maybe we don't follow the most sustainable pathway, whether we use specific inks, or things like that. But at this point in time, you know, if we design with sustainability in mind, maybe it's the right inks in that are biodegradable, and we design our machine learning models around sensing with those specific inks, or embroidery techniques that are, you know, sustainable, then the entirety of the thing, we're building sustainable. But even going beyond that, we didn't have to ensure that the manufacturers also following sustainable practices went to building these smart textile things, and then moving I guess, it's just a huge domino effect, really, of everything.

Speaker 1
I mean, is it quite a big hurdle, then to consider sustainability? Because I mean, if it was me, I just be like, Oh, I just want this to work. That's my top of my agenda.

Speaker 2
Yeah, no, you're right. But I mean, I think we're early enough in this phase of smart textiles, who can actually do it? Right? Because once we do this smart, like, it's not just that we do smart Textiles is that the entirety of the supply chain will change with it, right? To accommodate things. So for example, you come up like, like we talked about capacity. All right. Let's say we make a garment that use capacity, well, then there needs to be a process in the supply chain, where they can actually test the thing, right? So every change we introduce with the smart textile introduces a change in the supply chain. But if we designed the thing to be sustainable from the beginning, then that also means any domino effect that occurs because of it is sustainable stuff. Okay.

Speaker 1
Right. Well, that's interesting to know, then. So I mean, on that note, then, do you think any regulations, you know, sustainability or otherwise, will have to be brought in regarding smart textiles in the future? I mean, one topic that I was discussing the other day was the issue maybe of security, if you're looking at medical and, you know, obtaining data and so on. 

Speaker 2
Yeah, I mean, obviously, we have like, the GDPR requirements now for everything, right, with data and storage, and all those things. I mean, that's already there. But we've already I think, for the most part, many companies have kind of figured that out. So I don't see too much issue there. I think one of the main challenges might actually be the carbon neutral, or carbon, like not having as much carbon just in terms of the way you work, right, that supply chain, because even a lot of stuff that we do with the technical side of things is is very much not carbon neutral. Right? So making that carbon neutral, and then also all the changes we have to make down the line for us. That for me, I think is one of the main challenges. And even in Microsoft, we're working towards carbon neutral, I think by 2030. So that's also something coming up for us as well. Right.

Speaker 1
Okay. Well, that's interesting to hear, then, I mean, that's not something I actually immediately thought of. I was thinking maybe Steve with the metals or things like that. 

Speaker 2
Oh, yeah. No, that's that's an element too. And as it but the thing is with with smart textiles, right, there's a lot of different techniques you can use. There's embroidery, there's inking, there's, you know, the fibres that you use, right, so making those processes, I guess, sustainable themselves also introduces a domino effect, as I mentioned. Yeah. And there's also batteries, right? Like, how do we solve batteries? Right? If we can't, if you can't throw them away as much, or you have to make them reusable, then there's an element of Where did they go after? Men? If that's the case, then how do we introduce things like solar power and those type of fabrics? And if we make them, can they be sustainable? Right? There's a lot of those hurdles. 

Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's so many different elements to consider. Well, I mean, unfortunately, we're running out of time. But before I have to let you go, I guess my last question would be is, are you working on any other new products that you can talk about? Or do you perhaps have, say, a wish list of things that you'd like to invent one day, but you just don't have the resources yet?

Speaker 2
I mean, a couple interesting things that we've been working on, I guess, on the research side that I can talk about. So if you've seen followed some of the work that I had mentioned earlier, with smart textiles, one of the main challenges is with deformation. So deformation means, you know, when you move something, or you move a piece of fabric, so something for example, in your pocket, the fabric in your pocket, and moves around quite a bit, right. And let's say you have sensors on it, the sensor accuracy is going to be very hard because an object is going to touch only parts of it, which makes it very hard to do sensing of the objects, which I've talked about earlier. So this work that we have coming up in, I believe may, its public. Actually, you can look it up right now. I think it's called Project Taska. And what we do project Taska is effectively a smart pocket where we tried to solve some of the challenges deformation So we made a pretty cool little fabric that had multiple layers of sensing. And you know, depending on how the object touches the fabric, and which part of the sensors that are detecting it, there's enough accuracy between the three types of sensors that you can know what other just touching your pocket like inside your pocket. Now why that I mentioned is unique is now it's no longer just a tablecloths. But it's a tablecloth that you can punch up and still put an object on it, which I think is super cool. And in deformation is one of the main challenges with a lot of this smart textile work. So a lot of work with like lights. There's a lot of work with, like, sensing, but what happens when that sensor is all scrunched up on your shirt? Because we don't wear everything flat on our body. Right? So that's what we were looking at with that with Project Tasco. And then, yeah, if I had unlimited resources to work on something, I probably would I mean, to be honest, I as I mentioned, I love I love the Marvel movies and Iron Man. So I'd love to make the crazy Ironman and I know like in the last Avengers movie had the crazy nano particle wearable love to make that thing.

Speaker 1
Well, I mean, if anyone's going to make these things, then it sounds like you're the guy to do it.

Speaker 2
I don't know what that but I hope I hope I in my career enable someone who can who can do it. My job is to empower everybody else. So right

Speaker 1
Well, well, Teddy. I mean, as I said, we're gonna have to wrap things up, unfortunately. But I mean, it's been brilliant to have the chance to sort of wrack your brains today about smart textiles. There's probably a million other questions I could ask you because this is a sector that is in its infancy, really. So I mean, just thank you very much for coming on the show today. I've really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2
Yeah, thanks for having me are super appreciated and happy to chat about anything related to wearables or textiles anytime.