Wearables Beyond Fitness Trackers: Smart Apparel Reveals The True Effort Of A Client

Have you ever wondered why everyone, including non-active people, uses a smartwatch? Because even just the idea of personalization is appealing to us. Many people use a smartwatch only to see their heart rate, even if they don’t really use the data. Just looking and seeing a number delivers it. But is this enough for athletes and sports enthusiasts? Are there any better or more comprehensive technologies that give more data? Yes, many. One of them is smart clothing, also known as smart textiles.

Smartwatches measure at least heart rate, calories burned, and sleep. Fitness trackers provide a bit more data, such as blood oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and stress. Both are really helpful, and many people are already using them. So, you should definitely keep an eye on that useful data, but don’t stop there.

Wearables are going wild: their market size is 178 billion in 2024. A wide range of wearables is available, from smart contact lenses to smart jewelry and textiles. Smart clothing provides extensive real-time data in a very comfortable way. This means you can see clients’ biometrics at any given moment they’re wearing the clothing.

What is Smart Clothing and How It’s Helpful to Clients

Smart clothing consists of garments with embedded sensors. They provide extensive real-time data without the need for extra gadgets. The data you can get from these clothes includes but is not limited to:

  • Cardiac: Sensors measure cardiac data, including ECG, heart rate, and heart rate variability. They provide information on heart rate zones, maximum heart rate, and resting heart rate. All this data is highly valuable, offering insights into a client’s recovery, effort, load, and fatigue. ECG, or electrocardiogram, records the electrical activity of the heart. Fitness trackers also measure heart rate, but smart clothing’s ECG is more accurate than the heart rate measurements of most optical sensor-based fitness trackers. 
  • Respiratory: Sensors can measure breathing rate, minute ventilation, and VO2max (maximal oxygen consumption). These help to understand a client’s aerobic capacity and respiratory efficiency. 
  • Body movement and temperature: Sensors track body temperature, posture, muscle activity, steps, cadence, and location. 

Smart clothing can measure all this data at the cost of most high-end fitness trackers. Imagine having this much biometric data about a client. You can customize their training and monitor its effects on another level with only one tool. 

Smart Clothing on the Market

Athos has created a smart T-shirt with 14 sensors. These sensors track the activity and load of upper body muscles, including pecs, biceps, triceps, deltoids, lats, and traps, separately on both sides. It also measures cardiac and respiratory activity, as well as calorie expenditure. When a client puts on an Athos T-shirt, you can see how much each muscle works during training through their app. As a coach, you have access to the Training Center, where you can view a client’s muscle performance data. Athos claims this technology can enhance performance and reduce injury.

Hexoskin and Astroskin provide most of the cardiac and respiratory data mentioned above. They also measure step count, cadence, stride, activity level, burned calories, and sleep quality. Hexoskin has more than 36 hours of battery life and 100 days of recording.

Smart Clothing on the Market

Image: Astroskin | Hexoskin

Zephyr offers a chest-worn strap that is similar to a heart rate monitor. This device measures heart rate and more than 20 other biometrics. These include cardiac activity, respiration, estimated core body temperature, training loads, intensity, and location, such as speed, distance, and elevation.

Sensoria offers a smart T-shirt, sports bra, and socks that measure data related to running. They track speed, pace, cadence, foot landing, altitude, and distance. Spotting poor form has never been easier.

These are a number of companies that currently sell smart textiles. Many more are in development to measure extensive data without invasive methods. For example, current blood glucose monitors are still invasive (the sensors contain small needles), but new research is focusing on glucose monitoring with smart clothing. Can you imagine how this could improve the health and sports performance of many clients with chronic diseases?

TracKnee is another product that is in development. It is designed to monitor knee health. This can be beneficial for the rehabilitation process of many athletes with knee injuries. 

New technologies keep coming. Now more than ever, it’s important for coaches to stay up to date with wearable technology. These tools, along with your guidance, help clients reach their optimal health, sports performance, and recovery.

Final Thoughts

Although smart textiles seem to be expensive, they offer great value.  Coaches can access useful data that even high-end fitness trackers can’t provide. All this data is there for you to use. You can evaluate a client’s fatigue, readiness, training volume, fitness improvements, and calorie expenditure. This allows you to make personalized decisions for clients’ optimal training intensity and recovery which is crucial to reaching the best sports performance on an individual basis. 

Sources:

  1. A Systematic Review of Smart Clothing in Sports: possible Applications to Extreme Sports 
  2. Review on Smart Electro-Clothing Systems (SeCSs) 
  3. Textile Chemical Sensors Based on Conductive Polymers for the Analysis of Sweat 
  4. Effects of smart garments on the well-being of athletes: a scoping review protocol  
  5. Wearable Technology Market Size to Reach USD 635.82 Billion by 2034 
  6. Effects of smart garments on the well-being of athletes: a scoping review protocol – PMC 
  7. Electronic textiles: New age of wearable technology for healthcare and fitness solutions – PMC 
  8. Smart Textiles and Sensorized Garments for Physiological Monitoring: A Review of Available Solutions and Techniques – PMC
  9. Smart Shirts for Monitoring Physiological Parameters: Scoping Review – PMC 

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