* Illustration: Jim Stoten * I'm sitting in the offices of Smartex near Pisa, Italy, admiring a jogging bra into which a piezoelectric sensor has been woven. A muscular young man wearing a skin-tight gray tank suit walks in. Without a word, he sets up a laptop and begins jumping up and down. His heart rate pops up on the screen and climbs as his exertions become more vigorous.
Since we're in Italy, of course, the tank looks fabulous. But that isn't the point. Smartex, cofounded by biomedical engineer Danilo De Rossi, aims to create clothing that not only provides cover, warmth, and style but also keeps its wearers healthy.
"If I want to monitor a whole body," De Rossi says, "why not use clothes?"The "Wealthy" outfit (the name is a loose acronym for "wearable health care system") worn by the young man is the most developed of Smartex's recent designs. Powered by a tiny embedded lithium battery, it's a washable unitard that reads the wearer's vital signs and beams the data wirelessly to a computer. Information on posture and movement is measured by the stress on sensors built into the garment. Other components gauge electrical activity, yielding EKG data. Heat sensors measure temperature. In the not-so-distant future, De Rossi says, health professionals will be able to monitor cardiac patients by unobtrusively tracking their vital signs as they go about their lives.
De Rossi, who has worked on robotic skin and motion-capture tech for Darpa and the US National Institutes of Health, began exploring the idea of fabric as a data-collection medium 12 years ago. Most of his designs employ thin, pliable strands of conductive steel spun with cotton or polyester fibers into yarn. The Wealthy suit has nine electrodes and conductive leads woven in, yet the fabric looks and feels completely normal.
The challenge in incorporating sensors into clothing — even skin-tight unitards — is that the fabric shifts when the body moves, resulting in sloppy, irregular signals. To deal with this, De Rossi's team developed software algorithms to clean up the data, along with code to reconstruct the wearer's movements. These programs are the real genius behind the company's work.
After the tank suit demo, De Rossi takes me upstairs to the University of Pisa lab he runs. There, an assistant shows me a piezoelectric shirt that will let disabled people operate a wheelchair using only shoulder nudges. Another researcher slips on a Spider-Man-like glove made of red Lycra and begins performing sign language that a computer translates into words. In another corner is a truck seat upholstered in fabric that recognizes the driver by monitoring "load distribution" — a polite way of saying it reads the precise dimensions of your backside.
As De Rossi leads me through his atelier, I mention that most of the clothes he designs are hipper than what's in my closet. He replies, "Even when you are sick, if you have something that doesn't look nice, you don't want to put it on."
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