Dress for success
Here’s something I never though I’d see: Fashion and medicine working together as a team. The goal is to create clothing that can quite literally let you wear your heart on your sleeve.
The BBC News article I read called them “smart textiles” but essentially it’s fabric woven with sensors that can monitor various levels of body fluids like sweat, as well as things like blood flow and heart rate.
While it sounds more like something that would be used by marathon runners, bodybuilders, or your typical gym rat, the researchers working to develop this technology actually intend it for use by the general public, particularly in cases where a person may be at risk for cardiovascular problems or serious infections (such as after surgery). They say their clothing items will be ideal for these people because they can “monitor the body’s vital signs, assess the progress of wound healing, and spot illnesses and infections at a very early stage by pinpointing abnormalities in metabolism.”
Of course, even if they are able to achieve these goals and make their fabric available to the public, these clothes won’t be the sole factor involved in diagnosing illnesses, since they will be useful primarily for tracking general trends within the body, not predicting specific events.
But any additional tools that can help doctors spot problems before they occur will only help keep you safer and healthier in the long run.
Source:
“Smart clothes to monitor health,” BBC News, 6/11/07
