Clever Clothing

A Niche Form of Fitness Tracking Shows Potential

Last year, several start-up companies including AiQ, Athos, Clothing+, Hexoskin, Mbody and OMsignal showcased their smart clothing products and concepts. The devices claim to offer various benefits over traditional wrist-worn fitness trackers, including the ability to monitor activity more precisely and record breathing, posture and muscle exertion. I pre-ordered the OMsignal smart shirt last year and, after numerous delays, finally received it this month.

The OMsignal shirt has passive sensors woven into its material (left), and uses a detachable module to read and send the data to the wearer’s smartphone (right).

I tested it out when running and at the gym, and wanted to share my thoughts on the product and smart clothing in general.

The quality of the material used for the compression shirt is excellent, and it’s comfortable to wear. The detachable black box on the left of the chest clips on securely, and doesn’t get in the way of exercising as much as I thought it would. Information is synced with the phone almost instantly.

However, the OMsignal shirt feels like a first-generation product. The app’s features are disappointingly simple, offering basic readouts of heart rate, breathing rate, calories burned and its “push” metric (claiming to measure the user’s overall level of effort). The company is in the process of incorporating more detailed features, such as the ability to use the shirt without your smartphone with you, breathing depth monitoring, guided breathing exercises and live coaching.

The smart clothing market is very niche, driven by start-ups and keen fans of fitness and technology. Even if considerable demand built quickly, the small companies still lack the funds to scale their operations.

However, I think this will start to change in 2015. At the end of 2014, Clothing+ and OMsignal secured partnerships with Victoria’s Secret and Ralph Lauren respectively. This is a first step toward building wider awareness of smart clothing and its capabilities, and represents an opportunity for big sports clothing brands like Adidas, Nike and Under Armour to offer smart versions of their existing compression clothing.

I believe that smart clothing is best suited for sport-specific uses, and that this will generate most sales. Many sports clubs are already utilising smart clothing — in training and during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the Adidas miCoach elite team system was used by the likes of Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Mexico and, of course, Germany. The miCoach elite smart clothing transmits the wearer’s heart rate, speed, distance, acceleration and power to a receiver that sends those metrics to an iPad. This gives a team’s manager live insights into the performance of each player.

Smart clothing is also likely to appeal to sports enthusiasts. However, I don’t think it’s a practical solution for day-to-day fitness or wellness tracking — fitness tracking bands and smartwatches are less intrusive, have a more convenient design and a longer battery life. They’re also more affordable than smart clothing, as smart clothing requires numerous smart garments for daily use and will fail after a number of wash cycles. Smart clothing is clever, but the wrist-worn form will continue to dominate for some time.

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