OMsignal’s version of wearable tech is a T-shirt with knitted electrodes to sense your heart and breathing rates.
On Thursday, OMsignal unveiled four shirts that sense your heart and breathing levels via electrodes knitted into the fabric. These signals, plus details of your movements, are recorded by a gadget that snaps into a pocket on the side of the shirt; an accompanying iPhone app shows stats like calories burned and steps moved and aims to tell you things like how much energy you have left before you’ll feel spent. ...
Lucy Dunne, an associate professor of apparel design and wearable technology at the University of Minnesota, says that taking clinically accurate readings of physiological signals is hard with textiles because it’s difficult to get good contact with the body. “But it seems as if they’re aiming more at a lifestyle, quantified-self application,” she says. “From that, you can extrapolate if there’s a little bit of consistency in the signal you can still get an estimate, which can be really useful as well.”
As far as durability, Marceau says the shirt has held up through 50 wash cycles so far. It has made it through the dryer, although OMsignal recommends air drying. Though the black box is water-resistant, it’s not meant to be washed with the shirt.
Even if the shirts hold up in the wash, Becky Stern, director of wearable electronics at DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries, points out that sweat could eventually prove harmful. That’s because there’s salt in sweat, and salt corrodes silver, which could reduce the conductivity of the metal in the shirt.