Climate controlled jacket keeps wearer hot or cold

When Kranthi Vistakula moved from the sweltering heat of Hyderabad, India, to study at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the frigid East Coast winters gave the young engineer a chilly reception. Trudging through Boston's sub-zero winters with layers of clothing -- only later to remove those layers once inside warm classrooms -- irked Vistakula. So he created a climate-controlled, all-weather jacket capable of adjusting to extreme temperatures.
The MIT graduate is now CEO of Dhama Innovations, his start-up in Hyderabad that has begun selling ClimaWare jackets and other clothing that allow wearers to control their comfort level without adding or removing layers.
"Our products can go from 0 to 100 degrees Celsius in the push of a button," Vistakula told reporters. "We have four levels of heating and four levels of cooling that include low, medium, high and very high."
Despite bulky prototypes weighing over 7 pounds, complete with motorised fans, heating pipes and electric wiring, Vistakula settled on a more streamlined design by using a thermoelectric device called a Peltier plate, which consists of a junction between two different metals. Forcing an electric current across that junction causes the metal on one side to heat up, and the metal on the other side to cool down.

The ClimaWare Jacket