Signals

Canada – Technology start-up Aexos has developed a compression shirt that helps reduce whiplash and the likelihood of concussion during contact sports.

The long-term health consequences of sports-related injuries has become a major topic of conversation in the sports industry. In response to both athletes’ and sports teams’ concerns, Aexos developed the Halo shirt, which not only provides postural support for sports players without affecting their mobility, but also aims to reduce the impact of contact play. The design's key innovation is found in its high collar. During normal play the shirt’s smart material remains soft, but on impact the material stiffens to improve neck stability, slowing the rate of whiplash motion by 46%.

Elsewhere, sports brands are investing in athletes’ health by focusing on recovery. At CES 2017, Under Armour unveiled a new line of sleepwear embedded with a bioceramic material known to improve sleep quality.

Global – At the recent IFA consumer electronics show, the company announced that its virtual assistant will now include multilingual support, enabling devices to understand and speak more than one language at a time.

Family members in bilingual homes will now be able to adjust their devices to speak and understand two languages interchangeably. Users can issue commands such as ‘Hey Google, turn off the hallway light’ or ‘¡Hey Google, apaga la luz del pasillo’, and the device will respond to either command. This upgraded assistant is able to understand any pair of languages from English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese, and there are plans to add more languages in the coming months.

As technology becomes a prominent part of the home, Google is continuing to demonstrate efforts to make human conversation with virtual devices more natural, with this now accommodating different language and speech behaviours. For more on how design and technology are changing in a new era of Bricolage Living, see our macrotrend here.

Each year, 1.6bn tons of food, which is equivalent to one third of the total amount of food produced globally, goes to waste. A new report by consultancy firm Boston Consulting Group suggests these figures will continue to rise as the problem emerges as a critical global issue.

To tackle the scale and scope of the problem, food suppliers, hospitality, travel and CPG brands must consider how they can help to either reduce or repurpose food waste. Seen in practice, US company Agraloop has launched a new initiative, Crop-A-Porter, which transforms leftover yields from crops such as bananas, sugar cane and pineapples into biofibre that both reduces waste and provides additional income for farmers. The biofibre can then be woven into a sustainable textile fabric suitable for clothing. Elsewhere, food start-up Rise Products has developed a flour made from repurposed brewers’ grain.