Smart Clothing: The Future of Monitoring Health
Over the past decade, wearable technology such as smart wristbands, watches, rings, and patches have gained immense popularity. According to The Economist, smartwatches are catching on as fast as early mobile phones in the United States, and the most recent study on wearables estimates that about one in four Americans owns a smartwatch or fitness tracker.
Wearables have successfully entered the mainstream, and their popularity doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. In 2021, the global wearables market was valued at $116 billion, and analysts forecast it will grow to $265 billion by 2026.
The success of these devices is primarily due to the insights they offer users about their health. With the advancement of technology comes the novel ability to understand real, contextualized measures of your health status that only a doctor could see before. Not only are wearables revolutionizing the way we monitor patients, but they are also enabling patients to find new strategies to manage their health based on what they learn.
Imagine if we go a step beyond the typical wearables — expanding our scope to include things like smart clothing, smart shoes, and smart earbuds. For example, your smart shirt would detect your posture and respiration patterns; your smart shoes would get a more accurate read of your balance and activity levels; and your smart earbuds would measure your heart rate and potential hearing loss. If your smart shirt detects your posture is poor or your activity levels have been low for the day, it gives you a reminder to fix these things or at the very least be conscious that it’s happening.
Just imagine the paradigm shift this technology would initiate in healthcare: a newfound power and agency to control your own health in-between doctor’s visits. Empowering patients with their health data could propel a greater shift from in-patient to out-patient care, which would benefit the whole healthcare system.
What a wearable device can measure depends on its sensors and its software. Wearables like Somatix’s SafeBeing™ smartband utilize advanced machine learning algorithms to take over much of the effort and complexity, filtering out “noise” to extract non-explicit information, discover hidden connections, determine trends, and even forecast emerging patterns. Somatix’s smartband measures a wide array of health variables, including sleep, breathing, hydration, heart rate, oxygen saturation, UTI risk and more.
Ideally, smart clothes would sync the data they collect with a user’s smartband. As people’s wearables passively collect massive volumes of data, data from smart clothes would supplement this to fill in the knowledge gaps, provide additional metrics, and ultimately cross-check measurements. Ultimately, this advancement would give users more accurate and holistic overview of their health than one device could ever do alone.
Expanding our horizons to include other wearables like smart clothes would also improve physicians’ tools for providing effective diagnoses. For example, if a user struggles with managing their diabetes, their smartband could combine data with their glucose monitor and their smart shoes to help track their medication adherence, blood sugar, and activity levels respectively to provide a more complete view of a person’s health and what they may be struggling with. After detection, the mobile app would notify the person of the unhealthy pattern of behavior for their given condition(s), and voila — the person has the autonomy and the knowledge to respond to the problem and improve their health.
The time is now. The Covid-19 pandemic initiated rapid uptake in remote patient monitoring across the nation. Healthcare systems have great potential to see increased efficiency and coordination of care using wearables and implementing tech into everyday clothes are the next step.
There are a handful of smart clothes on the market today. The NADI X Smart Yoga Pants, for example, use embedded sensors with vibrating haptics and a paired app to nudge wearers into better form. The Sensoria smart sock delivers superior accuracy in step counting, speed, calories, altitude, cadence, foot landing technique, and more as you walk and run. The company asserts that its smart socks can help users identify injury-prone running styles, and its accompanying mobile app provides coaching.
As more apparel and tech companies also begin to venture into the world of smart clothes, people have more ways than ever to track their health. As a society, people must start thinking about how they can be responsible for their own health and take better care of themselves. With wearables, people can take action and decide the fate of their own lives.
