The Hug Shirt - This is cool....

The Hug Shirt™ is a Bluetooth accessory for Java enabled mobile phones. Hug Shirt™s don’t have any assigned phone number, all the data goes from the sensors Bluetooth to your mobile phone and your mobile phone delivers the hug data to your friend’s phone and it is seamlessly transmitted Bluetooth to his or her shirt!
Sending hugs is as easy as sending an SMS and you will be able to send hugs while you are on the move, in the same way and to the same places you are able to make phone calls (Rome to Tokyo, New York to Paris).

The system is very simple: a Hug Shirt™ (Bluetooth with sensors and actuators), a Bluetooth java enabled mobile phone with the HugMe™ java software running (it understands what the sensors are communicating), and on the other side another phone and another shirt. If you do not have a Hug Shirt™ but know that your friend has one you can still send them a hug creating it with the HugMe™ software and it will be delivered to your friend’s Hug Shirt™!

The Hug Shirt™ can be washed. The smart technology pads (containing sensors and actuators), placed under each red area that you see in the picture, can be removed for washing and placed back in afterwards. The Hug pads are plug and play, so that you don’t need to be an expert to place them and make it work! The Hug Shirt™s are available in many colors, so that you can move the smart pads from shirt to shirt and remain fashionable.

When touching the red areas on your Hug Shirt™ your mobile phone receives the sensors data via Bluetooth (hug pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat rate, time you are hugging for, etc) and then delivers it to the other person.

The hugs shirt is Bluetooth and works with mobile phones on any bandwidth (900 Mhz, 1800 Mhz and so on). Runs on rechargeable batteries. The Hug Shirt™ is built using RoHS components, it means that the Hug Shirt™ is lead-free and non-toxic.

Here below is an image of the Hug Shirt™, presented at SIGGraph in 2005. Images of the new Hug Shirt™ presented at Wired NextFest 2006 and as featured on Time Magazine will be available here soon!