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Seismic has four new strategic partners

24 Jan '19

5 min read

Courtesy: Seismic

Seismic, a company making clothes fused with discreet robotic muscles to create Powered Clothing, has become strategic partners with four leading companies across occupational safety, wellness and lifestyle, and healthcare industries. The announcement was made at CES 2019, the largest consumer electronics show. The partners include Cintas and Obayashi.

This signals Seismic's expansion beyond personal wellness to multiple Powered Clothing applications spanning a breadth of industries.

The other partners are Transforming Age, a national non-profit offering modern wellness and lifestyle choices for older adults, and Solid Biosciences, a life science company focused on solving Duchenne muscular dystrophy.Cintas Corporation is the largest supplier of corporate identity uniform programs in North America, and Obayashi is one of Japan's largest construction companies.

Seismic's first collection of Powered Clothing debuted on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018, the world's largest technology startup conference. Named the "core wellness suit," the garment is designed to augment human strength for the everyday consumer looking to enhance his core strength and posture. The bespoke suits have robotic components that provide up to 30 watts of power to each hip and the lower back to support daily activities — like sitting, standing, lifting, or carrying — and give people a physical advantage in their personal lives.

Demonstrating the broad potential of its core technology and team, Seismic will address new verticals with the support of strategic partners, creating innovative applications of Powered Clothing extended now to occupational safety, wellness and lifestyle and healthcare fields.

"We have strategically pursued different market verticals with significant partners that share our vision for impacting quality of life in their respective areas through Powered Clothing," Seismic CEO and founder Rich Mahoney said. "The news confirms the value of our mission to create apparel innovation to deliver broadly industry-changing impact. I'm thrilled to open our programmable platform to our partners and enhance Powered Clothing's utility in new ways to achieve unprecedented results in industries beyond personal wellness like occupational safety, wellness and lifestyle, and healthcare."

In a space where the dominant approach so far has been based on exoskeletons, Seismic is forging a different path as a clothing company. According to Pew Research Centre, more than 150 million Americans are part of the US workforce and the majority of them (102.6 million) work in the service sector. Service work include goods-production, transportation, construction and retail trade — jobs that generally require a level of physical strength and core wellness in order to meet work requirements.

However, the core wellness industry has still largely unmet needs. Postural weakness is the second most common cause of disability in US adults and a common reason for lost work days. Postural weakness can lead to back pain, reduced mobility and a decreased quality of life. The amount of lost wages and loss of productivity is estimated to be a total annual cost of $100 billion.

Seismic Powered Clothing addresses the need for core wellness on-the-job as it enters the occupational market in partnership with Cintas Corporation. Cintas serves more than one million businesses and every day, more than 5 million people go to work in a Cintas uniform. Co-development plans between Cintas and Seismic will begin immediately in areas of product and distribution for service worker support in industries including food service, automotive, hospitality and others. Cintas and Seismic will collaborate to bring Powered Clothing to the workforce.

Seismic has also entered into an agreement to begin co-developing next-generation industrial Powered Clothing with one of the largest construction organisations in Japan, Obayashi Corporation, a global team of 14,000 employees across 14 countries. The collaboration focuses on producing industry-specific clothing distributed and worn by Obayashi's construction workforce. Seismic suits will be worn as a base layer to support workers' core muscles to help augment strength when lifting, carrying or extended standing. Manual labour positions demand considerable physical exertion and this partnership aims to alleviate worksite fatigue. The first phase of this partnership will focus on initial product prototyping and pre-market testing this year.

Having grown 12.8 per cent in the last two years, health and wellness is the new trillion dollar industry, now valued at $4.2 trillion according to the Global Wellness Institute. As people incorporate more wellness values into their lifestyle, interaction with the wellness economy is becoming more intentional and less episodic.

Well ahead in recognising that wellness is already a dominant American lifestyle value, Transforming Age, a wellness and lifestyle network serving older adults, is the first industry company Seismic is partnering with in an early-stage membership programme designed to offer advanced access of Powered Clothing to people living across the lifestyle brand's modern retirement communities. Transforming Age has reserved the first 200 suits as Seismic becomes available in market.

"We're thrilled to partner with Seismic and be involved with emerging technologies that further our mission to transform the perception of age," Transforming Age CEO and president Torsten Hirche said.

Based on new data about the size of the booming $8 trillion healthcare industry, technological advancements in the health sector are on the rise still with many unmet needs. Seismic is entering healthcare to demonstrate innovative applications with Powered Clothing, and is partnering with life sciences company Solid Biosciences to collaborate on the latest advancements in technologies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The goals of the partnership are to apply Powered Clothing to help patients perform day-to-day activities with greater ease while ensuring development is guided by feedback from the Duchenne community to deliver appropriate design and functionality. New advancements in Powered Clothing derived from this research and development will help Seismic expand to other disability populations and rehabilitation partnership programmes. (SV)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India