'Smart' fabric could turn your clothes into wearable keycards

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a “smart” fabric that they say can be used to create clothing programmed with the wearer’s identity — making it possible to open doors at home and at work with just the swipe of a shirt cuff. “With our approach we can transform everyday clothes like a shirt into a magnetic hard drive that can store codes and images, and which can be thrown into a washer and dryer without any loss of information,” Justin Chan, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at the university and the lead author of a recent study about the new technology, told NBC News MACH in an email.