This week’s WearableTech roundup features a jacket that gets you to your destination, a bracelet that regulates your temperature, and head gear that helps you read while on the go.

NAVIGATE Jacket

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Created by Wearable Experiments, the NAVIGATE Jacket is smart piece of clothing that lets people know if they’re going the right way, without having to look at their smartphone or memorize addresses or directions.

The jacket uses integrated LED lighting and haptic feedback to tell you where to go. It has a companion app store where you can get directions that can be directly uploaded to the jacket.

The LED lighting is stylishly designed on the sleeves of the jacket and tells you how far until the next turn and your current progress. As for turning, the sleeves vibrate to the left or right depending on the direction in which you need to turn.

The NAVIGATE Jacket is a great way of integrating technology in everyday useful materials without getting overwhelmed by all these high-tech gadgets. It’s there when you need it and, when you don’t need it, you still have a cool, fashionable piece of clothing as the weather gets colder.

Wristify

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Global warming is making the Earth’s climate a little erratic. Seasons are now a bit off, snowing when it’s not supposed to and not snowing when it is supposed to. In some places, summers are shorter, while in other places they’re insanely longer. And, in some countries, the wet season seems to have extended to the whole year.

Because of these changes, we are now consuming more energy than ever before in order to power air conditioners or heaters, just so we can be comfortable when we sleep or while we do our daily routine.

In order to save on the electric bills, one team has come up with a design that won $10,000 and first prize in MIT’s Making and Designing Materials Engineering Competition (MADMEC).

Wristify is a temperature-altering device. What this means is, if this goes into production, instead of cooling or heating an entire house, people could just use Wristify to heat or cool themselves. Wristify uses a thermoelectric module to provide controllable and customizable thermal pulses to heat or cool the wrist. Sam Shames, a Wristify team member, stated that by cooling or heating a part of the body, a person automatically becomes comfortable, compared to turning the AC or heater on.

Wristify is still a work in progress; it may take a year two before it becomes commercially available.

Run-n-Read

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Many people like to read on their tablets or smartphones while riding the bus or subway, or when walking on their treadmill. But that’s a bit hard to do since your head bobs when you move; it’s quite difficult to concentrate on your reading. Some even experience headaches or dizziness when they do this.

Run-n-Read is a device that you wear on your head. It tracks the movement of your head and conveys that information to your mobile device so that the text on the screen moves in the same way as your head. This way, the text appears perfectly still even as you move, making it easier for you to read. You can clip Run-n-Read on a headband or on your shirt and it will still deliver the same results.

It was a crowdfunding project but, unfortunately, it did not achieve its funding goal of $30,000. Still, we could see this device for sale in the future if it finds enough investors or backers. As more people opt to do tasks while on the go, we might see a huge demand for this kind of wearable device.