Losing the remote is less of a catastrophe these days with TVs that can be controlled using your phone or your voice, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement: Researchers at Purdue University have developed a way to turn any fabric into a simple electronic device, so your favourite sweatpants for binge-watching Netflix could also double as a wearable remote.

It’s actually not that challenging to upgrade a piece of clothing with electronic smarts.

Google and Levis made a smartphone controlling denim jacket a few years ago, and companies like Columbia have made jackets with integrated heaters.

The problem is they always need a power source, like a battery, that needs occasional charging, and if you want to wash them, you have to temporarily strip out most of the electronic components.

In other words, unless you never spill food, don’t sweat, and ignore fashion trends, they’re rarely worth the effort.

As detailed in a recently published paper in the Advanced Functional Materials journal, the Purdue researchers have come up with an alternate approach that lets any garment of your choosing be upgraded with electronics.

She’d recently flown back from a work trip and complained that her fingers had been painfully cold on her drive home from the airport, thanks to below-freezing winter weather and a circulatory system condition known as Raynaud’s disease.

So Jmaxxz had the idea to buy her a remote starter that would connected to her car’s dashboard and, with an accompanying device and app called Linkr, allow her to start the car's engine with a tap on her phone.

A security-minded software engineer for a company he declined to name, Jmaxxz wondered what sort of remote hacking he might have left his girlfriend’s car susceptible to.

"In the back of my head I kept thinking, what’s the risk of this system, I’m putting her car on the internet," he remembers.

In a talk at the Defcon hacker conference today in Las Vegas, Jmaxxz described a series of vulnerabilities in MyCar, a system made by Canadian company Automobility, whose software is rebranded and distributed under names including MyCar Kia, Visions MyCar, Carlink, and Linkr-LT1.

MyCar's devices and apps connect to radio-based remote start devices like Fortin, CodeAlarm, and Flashlogic, using GPS and a cellular connection to extend their range to anywhere with an internet connection.