Clothes have always been at least in part, utilitarian, but until now, they’ve never served any real function other than protection and concealment. The new smart clothing from AiQ features built in sensors that can do amazing things like monitoring your heart rate, track your activity levels, and more. Sound too good to be true? Not for the designers at AiQ. In fact, their amazing fabrics are already in use in a number of stunning technologies.
What Is It?
AiQ smart clothing is essentially the future of sports monitoring, and quite possibly medical monitoring as well. The technology replaces strap and stick on sensors by simply integrating them into the garment so that the wearer doesn’t have to worry about loosing, misplacing, or even wearing their sensors. Instead, it’s right there in the clothing they’re wearing.
While a lot of people don’t see the need for sensors, they are currently extremely important in medical and sporting industries. Sports sensors are used by both amateur and pro athletes to monitor calorie burning, heart rate, speed, and more. In medical fields, sensors are important for monitoring most heart problems, and are being integrated in numerous ways. AiQ’s main production with their smart fabric is known as BioMan and can monitor your heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature, and in the NeoMan version, even lights up to make you more visible at night.
AiQ reccomends that their designs can be used for sports, medical, and everyday monitoring, and in fact, their BioMan fabric has already earned attention in the medical sector and is being looked at as a possible alternative to handing out wearable sensors. Plus, sensors in medical gowns and hospital clothing or blankets would allow physicians and caregivers a great deal more access to patient vitals while allowing them to be less invasive at the same time.
How Does AiQ Smart Clothing Work?
AiQ’s smart clothing features a standard sports jersey sewn with conductive steel yarn and laced with bio sensors in the form of textile electrodes. These sensors pick up basic personal data and then send it to your smartphone using Bluetooth. Essentially, it is the equivalent of a heart rate monitor, except you get to wear it as a durable item of clothing. The smart clothing also offers continuous heart rate monitoring while being worn, making it a perfect accessory for anyone who is worried about their heart health. Best of all, it’s also machine washable, so you wont have to treat your smart clothing any differently than your other jersey clothes.
Where to Get It
If you think you’re up to owning AiQ’s smart clothing, then you still have to wait a bit for most of it as it is not yet on the market. However, AiQ already has manufacturing designs and actual sports clothing made out of their fabric, so you can expect to see new designs coming soon.
AiQ also has a number of other wearable technologies on the market including lighted clothing for running at night, self heating clothing, touch screen friendly gloves, and anti-radiation clothing, all of which should be on the market soon.
