SmartLife Technology Limited, a UK based company founded in 2003, has designed and developed a garment based system with integrated sensors for sport, personal health and well-being monitoring.
In sports, integrating sensors that collect data about a wearers body conditions help elite athletes and regular folk to optimize the training and performance.
The same sensor technology gives advantages in health care by collecting vital data for monitoring patients during critical and recovery stages without the need to be connected to wires so-to-speak: looking like a Cyborg.
Hazardous environments like fire fighting, emergency teams, and also military personnel depend on knowing the danger to their bodies during action like stress, and exhaustion. Bulky devices that limit the movement especially in those life threatening/saving situations is the last thing those brave men and women need.
The common line for all those application fields is: e-textile technologies allow a seamless, totally none intrusive and obtrusive integration of sensor technology into garments and with that, the sensors are placed directly on the skin without any limitation on comfort for the wearer.
SmartLife’s technology enables garments to record full ‘clinical standard’ ECG in addition to heart rate, respiration rate, temperature and dry sensing. A garment fitted with those sensors remains fully washable.
We haven’t found any product on the market yet that uses SmartLife’s technology but all this sounds very promising. Hopefully we’ll see a SmartLife running shirt on the shelves soon.
This could also be useful for gaming enthusiasts, getting the excitement/stress level direct from a shirt to the game.
