Smartphone-Powered Suit Monitors Your Health
This suit is wirelessly powered by a smartphone for easy and accurate real-time monitoring of data like posture, body temperature, and gait.
Being a top athlete means pushing yourself to the limit and finding new ways to improve your performance. It’s essential for them to have the right tools to help them monitor their performance. Wearables like smartwatches have limitations, and clinical monitoring equipment is too bulky and messy. Now, a team of researchers has developed a new solution: a smartphone-powered suit that provides athletes with physiological data.
The suit, created by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), is made up of web-like circuitry that relays electromagnetic signals from a nearby smartphone to sensors on the body as far as a meter away. The circuitry’s inductive patterns act as hubs at various locations. Custom-made sensors placed at the hubs can then transmit data back to the smartphone. At the same, it’s getting power from the smartphone’s NFC chip eliminating the need for batteries. The suit works with most modern smartphones, which not only serves as the power source but displays the data as well.
Currently, the prototype can support up to six sensors per smartphone while collecting data like spinal posture, running gait, and body temperature at the same time. Though all the data is relevant for any athlete, the ability to read spinal posture is most significant. Spinal posture is an essential part of developing a good athletic stance, which helps reduce the risk of injury. The wireless, lightweight suit allows athletes to measure their spinal posture in real-time with little impact on their performance.
The researchers think the suit can prove useful in an application such as clinical diagnosis of spinal disorder and constant health monitoring. The data can easily be accessed using a custom-built app that can also send alerts if the user runs into issues, like overheating. Next, the team plans to build new sensors to increase the range of data collected. If the suits actually work, don’t be surprised if you start seeing more athletes wearing them while training.