How're You Feeling? Ask Your Shirt
What would you do if your shirt could tell you if you were sad?
Back in the '70s we had mood rings, which supposedly, by changing color, could tell whether you were nervous or anxious, or happy or mad. But now a company has put that technology into a shirt.
According to a story at smartplanet.com, a Montreal-based smart apparel company OMsignal has developed a T-shirt and a bra that not only tracks your daily steps, calorie burn and heart rate, but it also measures your breathing and emotional well-being using your heart rate variability, or HRV," reported VentureBeat.
Kirstin Korosec reports that OMsignal’s clothing contains a tool found in other fitness devices, which measures motion, steps and calories. "It also detects and measures two other signals: your ECG—the electrical signature of your heart—and respiration rhythms," she adds.
Sensors woven into the polyester/lycra fabric act as the EKG, producing a read-out of cardiac activity when the user is at rest or doing something active, according to the company," she notes in her story. A breathing sensor in the shirt measures respiratory rate and the depth of each breath.
The whole thing lives in a "tiny unit along with a transmitter and memory card that records the wearer’s movements throughout the day, according to the company’s blog," Korosec writes.
After all this, the user can connect the unit to Bluetooth to get a graph of his biological activity, using the OMSignal app.
You're going to have to wait a while to buy it, though, as it's still being tested.
I'm not so sure I'd want my clothes to tell me how well my body's doing, though I do wear an activity monitor (which shames me when I haven't lived up to 100% of my goal every day, though, some days, and here I'll brag, I'm go up to 130% of my goal!). But knowing me, and the hypochondriac I can sometimes be, if my heatbeat seems a little off, I may want to rush off to the ER. And we all know what a bad idea that is!
Back in the '70s we had mood rings, which supposedly, by changing color, could tell whether you were nervous or anxious, or happy or mad. But now a company has put that technology into a shirt.
According to a story at smartplanet.com, a Montreal-based smart apparel company OMsignal has developed a T-shirt and a bra that not only tracks your daily steps, calorie burn and heart rate, but it also measures your breathing and emotional well-being using your heart rate variability, or HRV," reported VentureBeat.
Kirstin Korosec reports that OMsignal’s clothing contains a tool found in other fitness devices, which measures motion, steps and calories. "It also detects and measures two other signals: your ECG—the electrical signature of your heart—and respiration rhythms," she adds.
Sensors woven into the polyester/lycra fabric act as the EKG, producing a read-out of cardiac activity when the user is at rest or doing something active, according to the company," she notes in her story. A breathing sensor in the shirt measures respiratory rate and the depth of each breath.
The whole thing lives in a "tiny unit along with a transmitter and memory card that records the wearer’s movements throughout the day, according to the company’s blog," Korosec writes.
After all this, the user can connect the unit to Bluetooth to get a graph of his biological activity, using the OMSignal app.
You're going to have to wait a while to buy it, though, as it's still being tested.
I'm not so sure I'd want my clothes to tell me how well my body's doing, though I do wear an activity monitor (which shames me when I haven't lived up to 100% of my goal every day, though, some days, and here I'll brag, I'm go up to 130% of my goal!). But knowing me, and the hypochondriac I can sometimes be, if my heatbeat seems a little off, I may want to rush off to the ER. And we all know what a bad idea that is!
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