Smart Shirt

The Smart Shirt is manufactured by Sensatex, but was developed by the Georgia Institute and originally funded by the US military's 21st Century Land Warrior Program and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (Bowie 2000). The shirt contains sensors that can be used to monitor vital signs such as heart rate, EKG, respiration, and blood pressure.

The Smart Shirt uses what the company calls interconnection technology that involves networking sensing, monitoring, and information processing devices (Sensatex 2005). Information from the optical sensing and electrical conducting fibers in the shirt are sent to a “transmitter at the base of the shirt where it is stored on a memory chip or sent to your doctor, coach, or personal server via a wireless network like Bluetooth, RF, wLAN, or cellular network”(Tollen 2001).

The Smart Shirt System designed for athletes can be used to maximize training and performance. The Athletic Smart Shirt System allows the athlete to track and monitor “biometric data, such as heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, caloric burn, and provides readouts via a wristwatch, PDA/smart phone, or voice” (Sensatex 2005). The information can also be stored and accessed using the internet in order for the athlete to track his or her progress over time.