5 Things You Need To Know About Smart T-Shirts
Smart apparel is it purely science fiction?
No it isn't so keep reading for the inside scoop on all things Smart T-shirts. Smart apparel is a new age concept that is slowly gaining traction among top fitness and health entrepreneurs.
It's uses as described by Butler Technologies is the ability to monitor:
- wearer activity
- blood pressure
- health indicators such as heart rate
- body temperature
Keep reading to see how these differ from a smart watch, and what benefits it has to the fitness industry.
1: The Rise of Smart T-Shirts in the Fitness Industry
In the mid 90s Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the first smart t-shirt was which no more than some traditional hardware strapped to a person. Moving forward a decade with the advancement in networking, interconnection, power supply, and sensors, engineers have now been able to create a seamless integration that could rival the smart watch.
2: The Benefits of Smart T-Shirts for Fitness Professionals
Smart t-shirts have the ability to track your core vitals better than your smart watch. The t-shirt itself is made out of normal textiles, but with increased sensors.
Smart T-shirts can track your temperature during exercise. The benefits of being able to track your temperature during exercise is an important factor when they are needing to understand why your body may under-perform in certain conditions. A person's core temperature is important as heat related illnesses from the core body temperature being too low or too high can cause long term problems.
3: The Impact of Smart T-Shirts on Client Engagement
As a personal trainer or fitness professional, being able to get a holistic view of your client is changing the traditional model. Before smart devices personal trainers relied heavily on heart rate monitors and other traditional forms to track their clients performance. With a Smart T-shirt, integrations can be automatically sent to an ipad, smart watch, or smart phone for your PT to keep an eye on the important core vitals.
4: Monitoring Heart Rate and Calorie Burn
Smart T-shirts will have the ability to more accurately monitor heart rate. However, it cannot calculate calorie burn. It does have the ability to connect to other apps in order to provide the data needed to make the calculation. Energy expenditure versus energy consumed is a complicated topic, and Smart devices are getting there, but will require help from other touch points such as phones, websites, smart watches, and even GPS and satellite tracking.
5: Connecting with Other Fitness Technology
Image connecting everything that you need from your house, to your healthy monitoring apps, and incorporate it with your fitness and well-being devices. This is the future. As the internet of things becomes more integrated, our lives as humans will become more virtual.
Smart T-shirts will be the next step in helping us keep track on the things that are important, but can't necessary monitor that well ourselves. By combining it with other smart devices getting healthy and fit, and staying healthy and fit is going to be easier.