Gore is recruiting startups to Silicon Valley to make wearables or flexible electronics from the same material used in Gore-Tex
I confess, I wasn’t familiar with W. L. Gore & Associates other than as the creator of Gore-Tex. So I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I visited its new Silicon Valley innovation center last week.
But then Paul Campbell and Linda Elkins, co-leaders of the center, pulled a sheet of the company’s expanded polytetrafluoroethylene polymer (PTFE) off a roll and put it in my hand. The flexible, stretchable fabric, thinner than an onion skin, was silky and soft. Draped on my hand, it looked and felt almost invisible. Campbell and Elkins think this material is the future of digital health wearables.
