Your sports bra can now tell your smartphone how you’re doing

Engineers at the University of Arkansas in the US are currently working on a new sports bra with a built-in health monitoring gadget that can wirelessly transmit all kinds of important data.

The wireless system in the new e-bra will be able to send and record lots of information that you might want to track as you workout, like blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate, oxygen consumption and even neural activity. These stats can then be transmitted to a health professional if you’re having treatment, or just to the patient’s smartphone so they can see what’s going on and keep track of the way their body reacts to certain exercises.

Not only can the clever bra track all important health signals, but it’s also GPS-enabled, so if you have some kind of emergency while you’re out and about it’ll be able to locate you.

Men shouldn’t think they’re missing out just because they don’t need to wear a bra either, as the technology could be used in a tight fitting vest too in the near future.

Vijay Varadan, a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University, said:

“Our e-bra enables continuous, real-time monitoring to identify any pathophysiological changes […] It is a platform on which various sensors for cardiac-health monitoring are integrated into the fabric. The garment collects and transmits vital health signals to any desired location in the world.”

It makes perfect sense that a heart monitor would be added into a sports bra, women have to wear one when they workout anyway, so why not make it even more useful? When we wrote up our list of what would make our dream fitness and health monitoring gadget a device that’s comfortable, easy to wear and compact were some of the key points and integrating a system into a sports bra would tick all of those boxes.

[Via Ecouterre]