25 July, 2016, by ClinCapture Team
Sensors and Clothing: A New Age?
What if a person could wear a shirt that recorded many of the things going on underneath their skin? Gone are the days of bulky heart rate monitors that provided inaccurate information. The newest item to hit the active wear market is the Hexoskin Smart shirt. It is a “smart shirt” that is designed to give the causal person exercising to high performance athletes lab quality results about their bio metric data.
An individual’s heart rate, heart rate variability, VO2 max, breathing rate and volume, as well as steps, calories, cadence are all measured. According the the American Council of Exercise, knowing an individual’s target heart rate is important to understand the level of intensity one is currently working out at.
A person could easily injure themselves if they are exercising too intensely, or wonder why they are not getting the results they want because the activity they are doing is not challenging them enough. Hexoskin accurately measures a person’s heart rate, leaving no question or guesswork to the degree of activity they just completed.
The way that the Hexoskin Smart shirt works: Data is collected by sensing elements in the shirt, which is then sent to a small instrument that is non-bulky and sits modestly in the shirt’s side pocket. This device collects all the data and is sent to Hexoskin’s secure storage servers—whether the user has a smart device nearby or not. Then, an individual can then review the data at whatever time is convenient for them. If there is a phone or tablet in range, the user can stream that data in real time to the device’s display.
The President’s Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition says that in the United States over eighty percent of adults do not meet the guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities. The Hexoskin Smart shirt is almost a form of motivation– helping adults exercise more, because seeing the results in a tangible way on a tablet or phone (streaming live or not) can be helpful in tracking exercising habits. A person can see where their strengths and weaknesses lie, and in turn, change their workout accordingly so they can make the most of their time and begin seeing real results with whatever their goal might be.
Knowing a professional athlete’s statistics has become so important. The New South Wales Waratahs rugby team in Australia ‘s Athletic Development Manager Haydn Masters says, “We thought the majority of injuries just happened. Now we know we can prevent them and predict them.” (source) With enough data, trainers can even predict what will happen to an athlete based on previous events, preventing possible injuries. This is a valuable tool in the world of competition athletics, but it can help anyone who decides to wear Hexoskin Smart.
The information gathered from the Hexoskin Smart shirt could be beneficial when going to the doctor, as the results are so accurate that a medical professional could use those results to a person’s advantage when getting a check-up. It is important for a person to understand their health data, and what’s going on within the body, and the Hexoskin Smart shirt can do that.
What’s Next?
Could this “smart” shirt even help with sleeplessness? The National Sleep Foundation attests to the fact that exercising regularly makes it easier to fall asleep and contributes to sounder sleep. Interestingly, the Hexoskin shirt and device can also be worn while sleeping, helping the user to better understand their sleeping habits, and in turn, correct the things that negatively impact their down time.
The old fashioned belts and monitors as bio metric tracking systems are a thing of the past. This shirt is a completely revolutionary way to track the bio metric data of the human body. Having the information available in real-time, as well as recorded, makes it easy to understand both an individual’s waking and sleeping hours. This is beneficial to both the wearer and their medical professionals and trainers. Gathering this information used to be difficult and inaccurate, but using the Hexoskin Smart shirt makes using and understanding an individual’s bio metric data quite easy.
Resources
http://www.acefitness.org/acefit/fitness-fact-article/38/monitoring-exercise-intensity-using-heart/
http://www.fitness.gov/resource-center/facts-and-statistics/
https://sleepfoundation.org/sleep-news/25-random-facts-about-sleep
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