News and Announcements
Footfalls and Heartbeats features on NewScientist
- Published April 08, 2014 4:23PM UTC
- Publisher Wholesale Investor
- Categories Company Updates
Clothes with hidden sensors act as an always-on doctor
NewScientist, Published: Thursday, April 3, 2014
The next generation of wearable technology aims to embed sensors in your clothes, so you only need to get dressed to start monitoring your health.”Wearable electronics are great but the only way they are going to take off is if you stick them on something people have to wear every day,” says Simon McMaster of Footfalls and Heartbeats, a company in New Zealand that is developing smart fibres with sensors knitted straight into the fabrics.
With conductive or optical sensors woven into T-shirts, shorts and underwear, smart clothes will be able to pick up a greater range of body signals, at much higher sensitivities, than rigid sensors.
“You can put the sensor wherever you want,” says McMaster. “Using conductive yarn you can control the structure and the conductivity in that area and make it more or less conductive, measure compressive force, tensile force, temperature,” he says.