The Luminesce Mountain Safety Jacket imagines the future of backcountry wearables with embedded head and wrist lights. A simple sensor detects when you have not been moving for an extended period of time and triggers the lights to flash, making you more visible to rescuers.
Check out this project on Instructables! Luminesce was a featured project on Instructables in December 2017.
Background
Improvements in lightweight and wearable electronics are opening new possibilities for bringing technology into the backcountry and using it to increase the safety of those who explore. For this project, I drew on my own experiences with outdoor adventuring to imagine the future of my favorite outdoor clothing brands and increase wilderness safety without being GPS-enabled.
Process
The Mountain Safety Jacket uses the Adafruit FLORA board to control FLORA Pixel LED strips embedded in the wrists and hood of a jacket. Like many headlamps, the wearer can toggle through several light settings to adjust the brightness and color of the LEDs. While the jacket is in use, a simple tilt switch senses whether or not the wearer is moving; after the wearer is motionless for 15 minutes, the circuit triggers the LEDs to flash endlessly, making the wearer more visible to rescuers. This flashing can only be deactivated by resetting the circuit using the FLORA board embedded on the back of the hood.
DISCLAIMER: this is a speculative object! It does not guarantee outdoor safety (nothing can guarantee outdoor safety) and has not been tested in a real backcountry setting (yet).
