Smart Clothing and the Future of Urban Fashion in Smart Cities

Imagine buying smart clothing that could tell you if your newborn baby has a fever or an elevated heart rate while remaining completely safe for the baby to wear, just like regular clothes.

Wearable technology has come a long way, from Apple Watches to Fitbits and other gadgets with smart sensors monitoring your vital signs, including sugar levels and even blood pressure.

Today, smart clothing is another wearable innovation that has joined the market.

What Is Smart Clothing?

Simply put, smart clothing is wearable garments that have been technologically enhanced. This enhancement increases their functionality beyond the traditional parameters.

These technology-enabled garments can perform many functions, primarily medical, including:

• Tracking your heart rate and heart rhythm
• Tracking your number of steps
• Measure your pulse rate
• Provide biometric data
• Track your temperature

This medical data is often transmitted to a specific app connected to smart clothing via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. This connectivity, however, isn’t necessary to classify a piece of clothing as smart.

Smart clothes, also called smart wear, smart textiles, e-textiles, smart fabrics, smart garments, or high-tech clothing, often use advanced textiles with interwoven circuitry. In some cases, the manufacturer can use sensors or additional proprietary hardware to give the garments their smart functionality.

What Are Some Real Examples of Smart Clothing?

Since wearable tech became a thing, many big and small companies have ventured into this industry, with smart clothes featuring in almost every known fashion category.

Nike, Adidas, and other sports manufacturers started incorporating technology into their wearable items, like sports shoes, and have now done so for over 15 years.

With such giant manufacturers joining the race, you can expect that more smart apparel will pop up in the future. For now, however, here are some real-life examples of smart clothes:

Smart Socks

Smart socks such as the Sensoria Smart Socks can monitor your steps and detect which part of your feet suffers from the most pressure whenever you are out on a run. The socks send this biometric data to the associated app on your smartphone.

Smart Shoes

When it comes to smart shoes, the Nike Adapt BB is probably the poster child for this kind of wearable tech. These shoes are connected to an app on your smartphone.

With the app, you can adjust the tightness of your shoes, change the lighting color on the soles to help you personalize them, and change the profile of your shoes depending on what you intend to do that day. You can change it to suit the basketball court, the track, or just strolling around town.

Here’s a video telling you more about Nike Adapt BB smart shoes.

Smart Sleepwear

The Athlete Recovery Sleepwear By Under Armour Is Probably The Most Advanced Smart Garment In This Category. Capable Of Absorbing The Heat From Your Body While Releasing Infrared Light, This Smart Sleepwear can help improve muscle recovery time and increase sleep quality.

Smart Casual Wear

Wearable Experiments has introduced an innovative pair of yoga pants called Nadi X. While it may seem, at first, that there’s nothing special about yoga pants, not as far as smart clothing is concerned, Nadi X does offer something different.

The company has integrated sensors that can read your body orientation (accelerometers) and tiny vibrators into the fabric of these yoga pants. The pants are directly connected to the Nadi X app, designed to guide you through various yoga poses.

As you move through the different poses, the accelerometers in the yoga pants sense your body orientation. That feedback is sent to the app, which communicates with the vibrators in your pants to help guide your posture or orientation to the correct position.

This helps to improve your yoga pose and increase your chances of gaining the most benefits from those poses because you will be doing them correctly as guided by the smart Nadi X yoga pants.

Smart Work Clothes

Samsung has reportedly made a smart business suit allowing you to unlock your phone, exchange digital business cards, and interact with other smart devices.

This video shows you more about Samsung’s smart business suit:

Technology Trends Impacting Smart Clothing

Here are some key technology trends impacting the smart clothing industry.

Advanced Fibers

There have been advancements in material science that have significantly added new functionalities to smart textiles. Most smart clothing companies combine regular fibers such as nylon, polyester, cotton, wool, silk, and even Kevlar with materials such as conductive polymers, optical fibers, and other metallics to develop reliable smart fashion.

When added to regular fibers or special fabrics, these materials can be converted to give these smart clothes sensory capabilities, data transmission, and electrical conductivity, technically making them wearable tech.

Since these smart clothes still need to be washed, and the more you wash these advanced fibers, the more they lose their added functionalities, so most manufacturers have opted to coat them with nanoparticles.

These nanoparticles increase the fabric’s durability while allowing it to retain its necessary tactile properties. The nanoparticles added to the fabric also allow the manufacturers to add certain features to their smart clothes. These include:

• Water-repellency
• Antibacterial properties
• UV protection

Recently, scientists have been trying to develop smart clothing using special fabric that can actually cool you down.

Researchers from Nanjing University in China and Stamford University in the United States combined silk fabric with aluminum oxide nanoparticles. Since silk already has a soothing feel to the skin and reflects almost 95% of sunlight, adding the aluminum oxide nanoparticles allowed it to stay 3.5°C cooler than its surroundings.

3D Printing

Another form of technology opening up a world of possibilities is 3D printing. These machines are capable of printing almost anything, depending on the programming. So, it really is no surprise that 3D printing has entered the textile industry.

This is spurred on by innovative programming from various scientists and researchers. Researchers in China (Tsinghua University) have found a way to use 3D printers to print patterns and pictures onto silk.

On the other hand, Intel has used 3D printers to develop sensor-embedded clothes. This shows that 3D printing has a place in this industry and will encourage further investment into the art online.

Smart Sensors

Sensors are quite effectively synonymous with smart clothing. Without sensors, smart clothes wouldn’t be capable of collecting the data needed for the wearer to monitor fitness levels and health conditions.

However, like the fabric, sensors get damaged when the smart garment is washed. As such, scientists and researchers are working on making these sensors capable of withstanding multiple washes without losing their performance capabilities.

Power Supply

Power supply is a big issue regarding wearable electronics. After all, these clothes aren’t like your phone; you won’t simply sit down somewhere and charge them up.

Most companies still use lithium-ion batteries, which don’t store that much charge for that long and, as such, need frequent charging, which can be inconvenient.

However, much research is going into alternative power sources for smart clothes. For example, The European Union (EU) plays a rather active role in finding alternative power sources for most electronics we use today.

To that end, the EU funds several initiatives to conduct thorough research and develop solutions. Thermo Tex is one such initiative. The company has explored using thermoelectric textiles designed to harvest their power from the wearer’s body heat.

The Smart2Go initiative is yet another example funded by the EU. The initiative is working to develop an autonomous energy supply platform that deals only with wearable devices, including smart clothing.

The initiative has combined various power harvesting technologies and powerful batteries to try and solve the extreme power supply constraints plaguing the smart wearables industry.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is quickly becoming front and center of everything tech-related. It’s, therefore, no surprise that it would make its way into smart clothing. Although the use of AI is still quite limited within the industry, it’s clear that its influence will be critical for the advancement of the sector.

As things stand, smart clothing companies such as Sensoria already offer AI-driven garments. Their smart t-shirts, for example, have an in-app coach that AI drives. This coach gathers data and runs performance analytics based on the wearer’s movements and uses that information to suggest better running or exercise techniques.

As one of the leading software companies, Google is not to be left behind regarding AI implementation and new innovations such as smart clothing. In 2019, the giant software developer started incorporating aspects of its Google Assistant on the Commuter Trucker jacket by Levi’s.

Although only conversational-based, the AI in these jackets can give wearers directions and answers to pre-recorded questions concerning time, weather, and news updates.

How Big Is the Global Smart Clothing Market?

While the market for intelligent clothing is still in its infancy, research shows it’s poised to hit the $8B mark by 2026. As far as wearable technology is concerned, the smart clothing segment is expected to grow faster than any other segment in the industry.

The adoption rate for this kind of technology will depend on how many other companies enter the market to produce better and more affordable smart garment options.

It also depends on how quickly the players in the industry solve the current and any future problems facing the industry. Power supply, longevity, and biometric sensors must be considered and fixed if the industry is to become a mainstay in the global clothing market.

While using your smart shirt to make a phone call or even hold a meeting might seem like a stretch right now, it’s important to remember that just a few years ago, smartwatches such as the Apple watch were just a thing in the movies. Today, over 200 million people worldwide own a smartwatch.

Smart clothing is being taken up much faster, and the more clothing and tech companies develop better ways to make these smart garments efficient and effective, the more people will buy and use them.

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