Abstract
Designing smart garments has strong interdisciplinary implications, specifically related to user and technical requirements, but also because of the very different applications they have: medicine, sport and fitness, lifestyle monitoring, workplace and job conditions analysis, etc. This paper aims to discuss some user, textile, and technical issues to be faced in sensorized clothes development. In relation to the user, the main requirements are anthropometric, gender-related, and aesthetical. In terms of these requirements, the user’s age, the target application, and fashion trends cannot be ignored, because they determine the compliance with the wearable system. Regarding textile requirements, functional factors—also influencing user comfort—are elasticity and washability, while more technical properties are the stability of the chemical agents’ effects for preserving the sensors’ efficacy and reliability, and assuring the proper duration of the product for the complete life cycle. From the technical side, the physiological issues are the most important: skin conductance, tolerance, irritation, and the effect of sweat and perspiration are key factors for reliable sensing. Other technical features such as battery size and duration, and the form factor of the sensor collector, should be considered, as they affect aesthetical requirements, which have proven to be crucial, as well as comfort and wearability.
Highlights
From the technological and societal point of view, the 2015–2025 decade has been identified as the “Wearable Era” [1,2,3]
The design factors include the physical features of the device such as shape, the form factor, the softness/rigidness of the case and related materials, and other design-related issues in relation to anthropometry and gender, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), positions on the body and/or into the garments, wearability, elasticity, and adherence to the body fixing element or of the garments
Personal Health Systems (PHS) were introduced in the late 1990s to support the generation of innovative healthcare services for a personalized medicine
Summary
From the technological and societal point of view, the 2015–2025 decade has been identified as the “Wearable Era” [1,2,3] This decade is characterized by the implementation and large diffusion of new miniaturized and wearable products supporting innovative sensing and feedback functions and related services with potentially enormous impacts on our lives. Most of these systems collect data and information from our body and support a basic data processing to provide the user with immediate feedback about his/her status and/or lifestyle. The non-intrusive monitoring paradigm is when the user forgets the ongoing process
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