While fitness trackers and smartwatches are two things battling for consumer attention, smart clothing is one thing that is expected to wane out the other two in the coming years. Currently, there’s only a handful of smart clothing on the market that measures various aspects of health and fitness.
The Hexoskin Smart Shirt, available for $399 in the market has made some great progress in the world of smart clothing. The workout shirt is unisex, clad with invisible sensors that measures heart rate and breathing, in addition to a small tracker device that clings to the cloth to capture motion such as cadence, steps, acceleration and so on.
The Hexoskin tracker is a tiny, Bluetooth-enabled device smaller than a credit card and easily fits into a square pocket on the side of the smart shirt. The tracker device fits into the little connector in the pocket and collects data from various sensors. The Bluetooth-enabled device then sends the data to your smartphone where it is collected in an app for iOS and Android. The device can store more than 150 hours worth of data, while its battery lasts for about 14 hours.
Hexoskin is First Biometric Shirt for Fitness
The Smart Shirt is made of polyamide microfibers, quite similar to the bathing-suit material. They can be machine washed, although you’ll have to disconnect and remove the Hexoskin device before it goes into the washing.
The Hexoskin app displays data (heart rate, speed, and cadence) on a graph in real time. The other measures are displayed at the bottom right next to their icons.
A lot of sports activities ranging from badminton to snowboarding are featured in the app. Wearer can not only track their workout times, speed, breathing and heart rate, but also conduct a heart rate deceleration test which indicates health. A faster deceleration of maximum heart rate is better. Wearer’s can also use the app to test their heart rate variability, which is an excellent indicator of whether the body has recovered from previous workout to exercise again at full-force.
The Hexoskin Smart Shirt is an excellent product to track data about your workouts and activities. The mobile app also has an incredible functionality.
