OMsignal’s Workout Clothes Share Biometric Data with Your Smartphone

Posted on 11/05/2014 by Alexandru Chiuariu

The compression garments developed by OMsignal collect vital details about your workout and send them to your smartphone, so you can quantify yourself and your performance over various periods of time.

The term wearable tech has a more literal meaning with each passing day. Biometric sensors are moving from wristbands and smartwatches to smart clothes and socks. After all, the best way to track fitness performance is to cover as great of a body area as possible.

Stéphane Marceau, CEO and co-founder of OMsignal, explained the necessity for biometric shirts: “We’ve been wearing clothing all our lives. It’s the most natural and therefore the ultimate ‘wearable’ medium. Clothing has always been about protection and fashion, but it will now also help motivate us to better ourselves every day. You would never drive a car without a speedometer, RPM or a fuel gauge, right? Well, with OM, you now get a dashboard to better steer your life, to increase your self-mastery, to push your fitness performance, and live a healthier lifestyle.”

Marceau also explained how the technology behind biometric sensors evolved in the recent years, and how wearables based on such sensors became a reality: “Exercise physiology research has defined human performance through intricate lab studies, but the technologies researchers use were never available for everyday and the aspiring athlete. You could never bring hospital or lab-type equipment with you on the court or track. OMsignal now makes it easy to track biometrics in real time, in real life and during sports activity. At OMsignal we’ve focused on giving consumers quality insights on performance, taking the research a step further to guide users to their peak performance.”

If it wasn’t obvious enough from the previous picture, then I’ll tell you that the OMsignal smart fitness shirts come in four styles: with long or short sleeves, with no sleeves at all and… I can’t seem to be able to pin the fourth style. Anyway, there seems to be a style and size for everybody, regardless if they’re working out indoors or outdoors.

The company is already taking pre-orders, and the biometric shirts are expected to be shipped this summer. A kit comprising a t-shirt and a smart black box that sends biometric data to your smartphone can be owned for $199, but the retail price is expected to be higher.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Sensoria smart sock and the Cityzen smart shirt that acts as a fitness tracker.

Cityzen Smart Shirt Acts as a Health Tracker, Recharges by Washing

Posted on 04/02/2014 by Alexandru Chiuariu

Cityzen Smart Shirt Sensing Fabric Health Monitoring

France, the homeland of haute couture, has yet one more reason to be proud of its creative minds, who have developed a fabric embedded with health tracking sensors.

Smart clothes are definitely not something new, as we’ve seen smart socks and even mood sweaters that give an visual interpretation of your feelings. Still, Cityzen’s approach is truly innovative, as it packs sensors within the fabric. With the help of these sensors, such aspects as body heat, heart rate, motion and location can be easily monitored. Initially presented at CES, last month, the Smart Sensing fabric brought Cityzen the Inclusive Innovation in Everyday Health award, a sign that cutting edge technology gets its deserved recognition.

Since there is no way such a shirt could pack a display (regardless of how advanced it is), all the data collected by the sensors is transmitted to a smartphone via Bluetooth, as seen in the above image.

Gilbert Reveillon, Cityzen’s international managing director, pointed out that the Smart Sensing textile could have many applications: “The fabric can be made into any clothing: gloves, shirts, pants, you name it. It is the first time ever that we managed to mix these two industries, embedding sensors into textile.”

According to Reveillon, the Cityzen smart shirt could revolutionize detection of serious health problems: “You can’t prevent a heart attack from happening, but you could definitely detect it hours, or even days, ahead of it taking place.”

Moreover, the smart fabric could also be used for athletic apparel and sports clothing, as Reveillon explains “On the field, a coach could tell when a member of the team has been running over capacity and put in a fresh player.” To accomplish this, Cityzen Sciences worked together with major French sports teams, in conjunction with members of the health industry.

Reveillon also revealed that while at CES, one of his company’s employees went for an hour-long walk on the Las Vegas strip wearing a t-shirt made from the smart fabric. The vital signs were displayed all the time on a smartphone screen and “The Las Vegas street definitely increases the heartbeat. The vibes are very positive.”

While the fabric can be ironed and washed without any problems, charging it simply by washing is a work in progress, but Reveillon promised that “In two years’ time, by washing it, you will recharge the batteries.” Now that’s a feature I’d like to see in person!

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories such as this one about smart pajamas that talk children into sleeping or the smart socks that track workouts.

Northeastern University Squid Shirt torso-on

Posted on 12/06/2012 by Brian Heater

It seems like everyone's got a solution for workout tracking, these days, and the undergrad students at Northeastern University are no different. We traveled to the bowels of the Boston school's Egan Research Center, to try the Squid Shirt that we saw back in February on for size. Our own Terrence O'Brien donned the garb, and while the current prototype has dropped much of the unwieldy wires and suction cups that gave the wearable its name, it's still a bit of a production, taking several minutes to put on with the aid of assistant academic specialist, Mark Sivak (who assured us that the student this specific model was designed for had gotten the whole thing down to a two or three minute streamlined process).

The shirt has a total of 13 EMG sensors, monitoring data from three muscle groups: the pecs, lats and delts. Every signal requires two sensors (with one attached to the hip for ground), which are ultra cheap and disposable, meaning you can just toss them away at the end of each workout session. In addition to monitoring muscle activity, a standard Polar heart rate monitor slips into a sleeve inside the shirt to keep track of your pulse. The shirt itself is machine washable, which again is good news, if you plan on working out in the thing. This is due in part to the fact that the box -- the brains of the operation -- is removable. This also means that you can use a single box to plug into different garments, which could include things like workout pants in the future.

Gallery: Northeastern University Squid torso-on