cycling safety jacket

First prize in this year's James Dyson Award has gone to London-based product design student Michael Chen, whose Reactiv jacket makes cycling in the city safer.

The Reactiv jacket uses an accelerometer to sense the rider's movement, changing the colour of LEDs on his or her back to green when accelerating, and to red when braking.

A tilt switch in the jacket makes LEDs in the sleeve flash amber when the cyclist lifts their arm to signal a turn.

James Dyson said: "Michael took a very real problem for cyclists ­visibility - and has engineered a solution. Reactiv is a brilliant safety device, especially when cyclists can be so vulnerable. The use of arm movements to operate the tilt switches and LEDs is especially clever".

The James Dyson Award is supported by the James Dyson Foundation, a registered charity whose aim is to inspire and excite young people about design engineering.

Michael is hoping to get his jacket into production, believing that it will reduce the 20,000 accidents involving cyclists on London roads every year.

inter faith hospital gown

The Inter-Faith Gown is a new hospital gown for patients who would like to be more modestly clothed. It has been developed by Interweave textiles of West Yorkshire. The gown preserves the modesty of patients whose culture or religion requires head garments and trousers in additional to mainstream hospital wear. The elements can be mixed-and-matched to enable the patient to obtain the required degree of coverage.

The Linen Services Manager at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust identified a need for the gown and developed the design.

software development for fashion sector

You don't need an MBA or research background to create an innovative and investible business. Marcia Lazar had spent twenty yeas developing the clothing company Science London, but she couldn’t find an off the shelf software package to manage her production cycle with the price and functions needed by the owner of a small business. So she wrote a new system called WhatsIt herself, with functions that guided procurement decisions, costings, the production process, and every step through to packing. She sold a beta version to friends and then to fifty commercial clients, before asking the Innovatory for help with a business plan. Before long, she became a client of the Gateway to Investment and raised a six figure sum to develop the final product from investor Simon Worth. "When you work for yourself," Marcia say, "you don't always value what you know as much as you should." Marcia's experience in the garment industry meant she had an extremely clear vision of a problem in the marketplace and the quality, functionality and price of the product that could solve it," says Kevin Davey of the Innovatory. "This led to an innovatory product, and the birth of a scaleable business that knew its route to market. No programming house on its own could have encoded a product so well informed by decades of problem solving in the international industry targeted by this product." The software is now being sold as F2IT and you request a demo here.