Smart clothing could help transition wearables from being a separate device to being one that users naturally wear. The technology, which is already getting the attention of athletes, features sensors that disappear into clothing.
Wearables may need such a transition—because while they were all the rage at CES this year, it remains to be seen how popular smartwatches, headset devices like Google Glass, and other body-worn devices will be with mainstream consumers. While fitness trackers like the FitBit and the Jawbone have proliferated, their popularity is limited to a relatively narrow demographic. What's more, the bulk of wearables developed so far have trouble presenting the data they collect in meaningful ways.
Fournier show off his company's Hexoscale smart shirt at the Designers of Things event in San Francisco.
Enter smart clothing, which itself is anything but new. With roots stretching back to NASA's Human Factors Group in 1985, smart garments have still not become mainstream. Even today, a NASA smart garment—known as E-SEWT—looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Developed in collaboration with the Pratt Institute, the University of New Hampshire, and the British firm Rotite, the E-SEWT features an onboard battery and electronics. The technology could assist astronauts in monitoring the spacecraft and performing emergency procedures while away from the cockpit.
It is worth pointing out that in the past several decades, many other government-sponsored technologies have become a staple of modern day life. GPS technology was developed in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Defense. And U.S. government-collected weather data gives millions of consumers access to real-time downloadable weather information and forecasts.
Perhaps NASA's E-SEWT will ultimately provide the inspiration for smart garments for consumers that could track health metrics, human performance, and other variables.
Sister publication EE Times covers one consumer-facing wearable technology known as Hexoskin that packs two microcontrollers, a Bluetooth radio, A USB controller, memory, and a battery in the packaged roughly the size of a stack of business cards.
"We'd like this part to disappear into the clothing, so you don't think about it," said Pierre-Alexander Fournier, chief executive of Hexoskin in an interview with EE Times. "It could be the size of a button, run on a coin cell so you don't need to charge it, and be something you can put in a washing machine. We are not there yet, mostly because of power consumption, which determines the battery size and device form factor."
The device can gather a range of health metrics including ECG, respiration, temperature, and blood oxygen level. In addition, the technology can come up with an estimate for blood pressure as well.
While the potential is there for this to be an important health monitoring technology for the mainstream, challenges certainly exist. For one thing, there is the gap between the clothing and electronics industries. "It's like traveling back to the 19th century when you visit [clothing] factories," said Fournier, in the aforementioned EE Times piece.
The technology is also still expensive. At present, the Hexoskin smart shirt costs $399 with onboard electronics included.
But like nearly all electronics, those costs are set to plummet with time, which could make for an array of interesting health- and medical-tracking applications at some indeterminate point in the future.
In the meantime, we can see whether the latest generations of smartphones, which include the ability to track users' activity levels and other health metrics, will have a measurable influence on their user base.
