Myant Inc., global pioneer and leader in textile computing, has announced the opening of a new business division in the United States to support the growth of its American partnerships. The new division, Myant USA (www.myantusa.com ), will leverage both local expertise in textile design, engineering and manufacturing as well as Myant’s interdisciplinary team of experts at its Toronto-based headquarters to better serve its US-based partners.

Myant says its pioneering work in textile computing is enabling a reality where textiles across daily life become bidirectional interfaces to the human body. This enables a new type of connectedness between people and their bodies, their communities, and their environments, the company says.

By knitting sensors and actuators into ordinary objects (e.g. your clothes, the seats in your car or home, and other textile surfaces in life), Myant is empowering companies across industries to radically redefine the value that their products can deliver, it adds. For example, an automotive company can now make a car seat with integrated pressure-sensing to measure fatigue, provide feedback to the driver to improve alertness at the wheel, and use actual behavioral data to justify better rates with their insurance company, Myant explains. An apparel manufacturer that makes base layers can now use biometric data like ECG to create a new way to optimize performance and monitor the well-being of first responders, says Myant. This ability to connect to the human body creates a way for more traditional industries to create value and become key players in the digital ecosystem, the Toronto based company states.

By choosing New York as home for Myant USA, the company is now strategically situated in a region that allows more seamless collaboration with partners in the Health, Fitness, Automotive, Defence, Home & Commercial Furnishings industries. The US facility will be staffed by experts complementing Myant’s world-class textile research & development team and allowing the company to expand its scope to include smart textiles for industrial, agricultural, and construction use cases.

The opening of the new facility also supports the company’s efforts to bring more partners on to DTX (www.digitaltextileexchange.com ), a cloud-based manufacturing platform that aims to democratize access to textile manufacturing capacity by dynamically connecting manufacturers with idle knitting machines to apparel brands. Partners leveraging DTX will be better able to access the advanced manufacturing necessary to innovate in textile computing and be better positioned to satisfy local production needs.

“Myant is the global leader in textile computing, and I feel that this is the right time for us to facilitate access to textile computing for current and future partners south of the border,” said Tony Chahine, founder and CEO of Myant. “In order for transformative change to occur, we believe that companies need to have easier access to innovation and to be better connected to their partners. The Myant USA facility aims to do just that.”

Myant USA Website

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