Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Why Smart Clothing is on the Rise

Imagine wearing a tracksuit that could improve the quality of your stride as you run and maximize the calories you burn as you work out? That’s the power of smart clothing, a new wave of activewear that pairs top tech software with stylish athletic wear. Smart clothing takes meaningful data and analyzes it to help you workout smarter and be healthier. This growing retail segment is exploding in popularity.

What is smart clothing?

The activewear industry is rapidly scaling its investments in clothing that helps consumers enhance their workouts with the help of technology. Smart clothing can track important biometrics like your heart rate, respiratory rate or basal metabolic rate (the rate used to monitor how your body burns calories). Alternatively, smart clothing can help you to stay cool as you work out. These metrics are of course incredibly important for professional athletes, but everyday athletes, who want to improve their workouts are wearing smart clothing more and more. Many top athleisure brands like Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, and Lululemon are leveraging best-in-class technology to create smart clothing for consumers. If you have a smartphone, you too can improve your fitness with the help of smart clothing, and smart shoes.

What are the benefits of smart clothing?

Safety: Have you ever been jogging at night and realized how dimly lit your path is? Doing activities at night can put you in a precarious situation as its hard for you to see hazards, and even harder for vehicles to spot you. Take control of your safety by wearing reflective smart clothing. Yes, there are basic reflective safety vests, but why not wear something more stylish and protective? Like the innovative reflective smart clothing from MAS Holdings that can flash in a sequence, alerting drivers there’s a moving person up ahead. MAS has collaborated with top athleisure brands like Victoria’s Secret and Lululemon to create smart, reflective clothing.

Moisture control: If you’re putting in solid work on the treadmill, it’s likely you’ll break a sweat. That’s where cooling smart clothing comes in handy with moisture wicking and anti-microbial odor control features that will keep you fresh and clean.

Performance control: Smart clothing, in particular, smart shoes can measure an athlete’s form and then provide recommendations to improve performance. For example, a smart tracker for shoes called Tune by the wearable tech company Kinematix, can show you how your foot hits the ground visually and record your stance time, stance dynamics, body symmetry, and stride, allowing you to correct inefficient strides and improve your performance.

Smart clothing saves lives: The Finnish tech company, Nokia has been pioneering sometimes odd, but fantastic tech products for years. That’s why it no surprise that Nokia has entered the smart clothing world with its groundbreaking CHASE Lifetech FR jacket designed for first responders like firefighters, police officers and emergency first responders. From a distance, it may look like a typical bright yellow firefighter jacket, but this jacket is far from ordinary. It contains modular sensors that allow the wearer to detect important metrics like temperature, heart rate, and GPS location. It can also capture granular data that is important for first responders, like carbon monoxide levels. The data obtained by the jacket is then sent back to the wearer’s base station, allowing the first responder’s team to keep track of a worker’s location and health on the job. For example, the data could help locate if someone goes missing on the job or determine that they are too fatigued or ill to be working based on health data from the sensors.

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