Could wearable technology impact our healthcare, fashion, and even sport?

In this latest research from The Journal of The Textile Institute, Park and Jayaraman explore the impact of modern day wearable technology on data gathering in the 21st Century.

A critical need for the proliferation of wearables for personalized mobile information processing is that they should not impose any additional social, psychological, or ergonomic burden on the individual, and this research suggests that the answer could lie in the clothes we wear, enhanced with technology. In today's harried world, an individual could well leave a personal electronic device behind one day (say, a smartphone), but is unlikely to walk out of the house without clothes.

Consider the impact this could have on our healthcare system. An individual typically receives four types of care; ambulatory, preventative, chronic, and acute. The data from these four points of care are distinct and fragmented, but wearable technology could be the solution.

Imagine the future: What if a driver's racing suit captured biometrics such as heart rate, electrocardiogram, body temperature, water loss, and calories burned, enabling them to display this information to their pit crew? And how about if a spectator could physically "experience" the G forces acting on the driver during the race with varying degrees of compression on their body?