Byron Wong, Feng Jia Jun and Li Jian Jia are the creators of Flexwarm, a wearable device that heats the user’s body to the perfect temperature. The jacket has heating elements in the back, the chest, and both sleeves. Gloves are integrated into the sleeves to keep the palm of the hand warm. The team is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a production run of the jackets.
The jacket uses an app and Bluetooth signal transmission to allow the user to program the temperature for each zone. The Kickstarter page shows a temperature range of 70 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit. The base technology is thin film heating elements with a silver slurry sintered into the fabric. A 5000 milliAmp hour battery pack will give approximately 3.5 hours of heating, and the jacket itself is rated for 100,000 hours.
Flexwarm’s promotional material says that traditional heating elements have required 12 Volts but the batteries to supply that voltage are larger and heavier. A 5 Volt battery pack that uses Flex’s technology and regional heating guided by the control code allow Flexwarm to use a lower Voltage.
The Kickstarter campaign page imagines the next steps that can happen after their technology is adopted. Emergency alerts could be sent through smart jackets, more sensors could be added for health monitoring, and elderly patients could be audited for temperature changes or to give proximity alerts.
Flexwarm is already established in Guangdong China as a developer of instant heating technologies. They currently produce scarf-like and belt heated wearables, along with smart jewelry and a cooking device that looks like a toaster oven. It’s interesting to me that the technology in the jacket is so old hat to the team that the Kickstarter page spends much more time explaining the fabric and layer construction than the heating elements themselves. They are also being bombarded with commenters asking for XXL sizes for our sizable North American frames. This is an interesting contrast to the different cooling wearables we’ve seen in the past few years designed to cool the body and burn calories.