Smart clothing has been taking over the wearable market recently. Every clothing article is being embedded with sensors for activity and movement detection. Whether it be smart shirts, e-shirts, smart shorts, smart shoes, headbands or even bras; the wearable industry has seen it all.
Read more: The Best of Intelligent Textiles In Medicine
These smart clothes with biosensors to detect activity time, distance, speed, heart rate, breath rate etc.
So the question, does the wearable market has more place for smart clothing?
Yes, but clothing with innovation. This reality was well understood by Vitali Wear. Vitali developed a unique smart sports bra which focuses more on health and wellbeing instead of the mainstream activity tracking.
Read more: Women Exclusive Defensive Armour For Contact Sports
The Vitali smart bra tracks your breathing rate, heartbeat rate and posture to let you maintain your calm and peace. It monitors your heart rate variability i.e. how frequently your heartbeat rises and falls in response to various everyday situations. Sudden elevation in heartbeat in response to stressful triggers has negative effects to your personal health. The Vitali has sensors to detect this variation and alarm you with a gentle tap right when it starts to happen. It makes your mindful towards your wellness and allows you to take control over situations at the right time.
Vitali has built-in gyroscope and accelerometer to track your posture. Whenever you slouch down or hunch down, a gentle buzz reminds you to maintain an erect posture which is essential for long term health and wellbeing.
Cindy Yu, creator Vitali, adapted yoga to combat her depression. She explains that although yoga benefited her greatly, it was very easy to deviate from her everyday yoga routine due to work, school and what not. Yu decided to take her yoga routine off the mat and into her everyday habits. According to Yu, “Systematic breathing and postural alignment are not only vital for the yoga practice, but also to our everyday wellbeing.” However, it is not easy to keep your mind on these signs amidst a hectic daily schedule.
“So I realized I needed a tool.” With her engineering skill, the first version of Vitali was a personal project to “live well with stress”.
Being a sports bra, Vitali is comfortable and flexible. Its fabric is embedded with three sensors that are waterproof and sweatproof.
It comes with a diamond shaped device called “gem” to be inserted at the top near your clavicle. It performs most of the sensing. The gem is not washable but you have to pop it out for every wash. You can also use one gem for multiple bras.
Read More: Firstbeat – Heartbeat and Physiology analytics for Well-being and Sports via Lifestyle Assessment
The Vitali Companion App gives you insight to your progress and daily moments of stress and negative impact. It is compatible to both Android and iOS. The project is up on Kickstarter and needs your backing.
[…] we have been coming across a lot of prototypes and designs for smart sports bra like it is almost taking a toll and flooding the innovative wearables. Supa Powered smart sports […]
[…] has always maintained its competitive edge whether it be the smartwatches or chestbands or any other health and fitness gadgets. Hence, we have always associated high hopes with […]