Smart Clothing: the naked truth
"For the best results you’ve got to
take everything off.” “I have.” “No, we mean everything. To see real results of
your performance, that’s what you’ve got to do.” “You mean, I’ve got to take my
underwear off too? Go commando?” “Yes.”
THE RIGHT WORKOUT
FOR ALL those who’ve got their dirty
minds working overtime and are imagining me at a pornmovie audition... Stop! No
such luck. I’m still in the world of technology, but for the very first time, I
have been trying out a gadget that requires me to be naked. Before your
imagination takes flight again, let me get started with this story.
DRESSING SMART
The world of wearable technology is
a billion-dollar business. Unfortunately, most of what is called a ‘Wearable’,
is mostly just a strapped-on product (fitness bands, VR headsets, etc). My move
from strappable to strippable involved smart clothing: a shirt and a pair of
shorts, with nothing underneath. This technology is years ahead of anything
else we’ve ever seen.
HOW WEARABLES WORK
Athos is a new start-up based in the
USA. It has come up with compression T-shirts and shorts that take a little
huffing and puffing to get into, (think super-skinny jeans), but once you’re in
them, you enter an unparallelled world of technology. The T-shirt and the
shorts have 26 sensors knitted into it, including heart-rate trackers,
breathing and respiratory monitors and multiple EMG (electromyography) sensors.
Each of these sensors makes contact with your skin (thus the need to be
completely naked underneath) and as you work out, every part of your body,
every muscle, is analysed. Every time we use our muscles, they generate
electrical activity that is measured by the EMG sensors. For the kind of
readings these clothes take, you’d need to go to a sports performance institute
and pay a whole lot of money. Now your T shirt can do the same!
REPLAY YOUR ROUTINE
The mindboggling part is that Athos
fitness wearables give you a real-time analysis of your fitness routine. As you
run, do squats, bicep curls or push-ups, each muscle that comes into use lights
up with a different colour. Based on your exertion and how hard you are pushing
those muscles, a colour code is generated. You can replay your entire workout,
check if you’re using the right muscles, determine if both sides of your body
are balanced, find out how much harder you can go without injuring yourself and
even discover whether your stance and motion is correct. It can also tell you
what you’re doing wrong. We could only dream about this a few years ago.
A RECORD RUN
Athos isn’t the only player in the
game. There are others that are doing the same thing but with different goals.
For instance OMsignal has come out with a biometric smart shirt. Once again, it
is a compression garment with builtin sensors that can monitor your breathing,
heart rate and count the steps you take. So when you go for a run, your shirt
will know the distance covered, your effort level, as well as heartbeat and
rate of breathing. No fitness band or heartbeat monitor required. Impressed
with this, the design house Ralph Lauren has come up with its own PoloTech
Shirt using OMsignal technology (the same T-shirt that carries the Polo logo).
OTHER SMARTY-PANTS
Other wearable brands in the market
include Hexoskin (their T-shirts have all the same features), Sensoria socks
(they analyse your running by determining where your foot lands and with what
impact), and Lenovo shoes (they have a screen on them to display your running
data as well as your mood). The basic idea for all these wearables is that you
wear what you normally would (T-shirts, shorts, socks, shoes) when you work
out, and the sensors come into play by themselves. No need to remember to add a
watch, band, headset or headphones.
MARKET SIZE: XXL
It’s not just the fitness and sports
market that is moving towards smart clothing. This has even bigger potential
for people with medical conditions like heart diseases and obesity, and helps
older people prevent injuries and fractures.
It’s estimated that the smart
clothing market will move from about 0.1 million pieces today to about 250
million pieces very soon. That’s an explosive growth for any category of
technology. With such great potential, may I just ask for any of them to come
up with shorts that don’t need me to be naked inside? After all, gym gear is
known to tear. If that was to happen in the middle of a workout, very different
data points would be open for analysis!
- Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology, NDTV, and
the anchor of Gadget Guru, Cell Guru and Newsnet 3
HTBR16AUG15
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