May 3, 2024

Samaira Mody

6th Grade

New York

A new trend that has started worldwide is the concept of smart clothing. These everyday wearables have technology fused into their fabrics to make the clothing somewhat “smart”. These pieces of clothing are used as stylish fashion with color-changing garments, helpful resources for medical patients, or tools to track an athlete's performance during a game.

The idea of smart clothing goes back to a man named H. Lee Wainwright. Wainwright created the first e-textile with an animated cartoon sweater he made in 1985. This sweater had actual moving figures of a dragon breathing fire and then morphing into a bird. After this invention, he went on to make special effects costumes for Hollywood and continued growing the idea of smart clothing.

E-textiles help reduce the use of expensive medical equipment at hospitals and are way more comfortable on one’s skin. Researchers at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) came up with the idea of using a special plastic yarn woven in between layers of knit fabric and called it 3DKniTS. The only problem was that the yarn was soft and moldable and any movement by the wearer would create friction. This would make the pressure sensor less accurate. The researchers then decided to make smart clothing by melting down plastic fibers at over 70 degrees Celsius so that when the textiles harden, they would hold the exact shape that they were given. Not all clothing has the adaptability of smart clothing. This is the smart textile fabrication process. 

Then pressure sensor data from the clothing is recorded on a heat map. The heat map pictures are then given to a computer to detect what the wearer is doing (such as sitting, standing, jumping, etc.). Smart clothing can be made with different types of smart fabrics which each have different technology components to them. This enables users to make use of smart clothing in many different ways. The smart fabric that is used in the medical business is pressure-sensitive fabric, which can help track a patient's vitals such as heart rate and blood oxygen levels. This helps the doctors to make quick decisions on their treatment plan.

Smart clothing is very helpful in the medical field and has been a real game-changer. Smart shirts that are worn by medical patients can help track chronic diseases (diseases that last more than three months and get worse over time). These shirts are “prescribed” to patients to allow them to remain in the comfort of their homes while their treatment is at hand. Smart clothing can also be in the form of stockings to keep watch of Edema patients (people whose legs swell at different rates). Lastly, blankets were created with fiber optics to observe a person's skin circulation to monitor bed sores and heart rate.

Companies such as Samsung and Google are investing in smart clothing. Smart clothing is still considerably a new addition to our lives but doctors believe that it will continue to revolutionize the medical field more and more as the technology develops.