Your clothing may soon be able to monitor your heart rate, respiration, temperature and even movement. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers in Boston have developed customizable, washable activewear, similar to compression shirts, complete with sensors. “We can have any commercially available electronic parts or custom lab-made electronics embedded within the textiles that we wear every day, creating comfortable garments,” said Canan Dagdeviren, PhD, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. “Our main goal was to measure the physical activity of the body in terms of temperature, respiration, acceleration, all from the same body part, without requiring any fixture or tape.”

The research was published in npj Flexible Electronics (2020; doi:10.1038/s41528-020-0068-y).