Sensors & Electronics
Awards & Recognition
FLC Awards
The Intellifit System takes customer measurements to help make clothing fit. The system sends a safe, low power radio wave toward a customer's fully clothed body and collects data points that are used to calculate numerous, accurate body measurements.
2005 - Millimeter Wave Holographic Body Scanner
Developers: Doug McMakin, Mark Goodwin, Tom Hall, David Martin, Gary Morgan, James Prince, Ron Severtsen, Dave Sheen, Meg Soldat and Erik Stenehjem.
A technology developed by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been recognized for its successful transfer to the commercial market. The Federal Laboratory Consortium announced PNNL has won a 2005 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award for the lab's holographic body scanner, an imaging technology that is being applied in two widely divergent industries — apparel and security.
Originally developed by the Laboratory for security applications, Pennsylvania-based Intellifit is using the technology to create body measurements for custom-fit clothing. The holographic imager creates a 360-degree high-resolution 3-D scan of a body in less than 10 seconds, allowing Intellifit to provide tailored measurements to designers or provide recommendations on best-fit clothing.
Here's how it works: millimeter waves harmlessly penetrate clothing and reflect off of the body, sending signals back to a transceiver; the transceiver then sends the signals to a high-speed computer that creates a final 3-D holographic image. Lastly, Intellifit's body measurement software is used in conjunction with the 3-D holographic image to obtain 80 accurate body measurements.
Another company, Safeview, Inc., Santa Clara, has commercialized the technology for use in aviation, prison, building and border crossing security. The scanner can quickly show the presence of non-metallic threats such as plastic and ceramic weapons, in addition to metal objects.
The technology also earned an R&D 100 award and the magazine editors' choice award for "Most Promising New Technology" in 2004.
Excerpted from PNNL FLC webpage.