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Ralph Lauren made a great fitness shirt that also happens to be 'smart'
Ralph Lauren's PoloTech shirt is smarter than it looks. It's also more expensive. The tee combines the fashion label's preppy aesthetic with the ability to deliver live metrics (heart rate, breathing and steps) from the shirt to your iPhone. The tech built into it isn't completely new, but Polo has added extra value through a companion app that offers workouts tailor-made to how your body is reacting. Basically, then, your effort informs the workout. Recently, I fell out of love with wrist-based fitness trackers, but the eventual goal of those gadgets is to become something akin to Ralph Lauren's shirt: sportswear that you would have worn anyway, but smarter. There are some big caveats, but just as Nike's Fuelband helped catalyze the whole fitness tracker thing, the PoloTech shirt could be the start of yet another generation of fitness tech.
OMsignal's biometric sports bra hits stores this spring
Four years ago, OMsignal set out to make a biometric sports bra -- but a lack of experience in clothing design hampered the company's progress. Eventually, the team released the OMsignal smart shirt, a product that worked, but only served half of the market. That's not a problem anymore: OMsignal just announced the OMbra, a biometric garment designed specifically for women.
Squeezing into OMsignal's smart shirt of the future
Thanksgiving is a time to remember things to be grateful for, stuff yourself with turkey and watch MST3k re-runs. But what happens the following day, when you wake up with a meat hangover that could kill a horse? That's the moment you'll stumble online, looking for new ways to lose weight and find OMsignal's biometric smart shirt. The fashionable piece is a sports-style compression garment that monitors your breathing, heart rate and step count, so I know that as I write this, I'm taking 18 breaths a minute and my heart is beating 76 times every 60 seconds. Neat, huh?
A closer look at Ralph Lauren's smart shirt for athletes
I wish I could say I went "hands-on" with Ralph Lauren's new tech-infused smart shirt, but that would have meant putting my hands all over Marcos Giron, the collegiate tennis player who's making his US Open debut this week. I'm sure he would not have appreciated that. Even so, I still got to see the shirt (and Giron) in person at a press event here in New York, where the tennis tournament is already underway. Read on to see how it works.
OMsignal's biometric shirt watches you breathe, tells your smartphone about it
Most fitness wearables wrap around your wrist or clip to your belt, but the folks at OMsignal have distilled the category down to its most basic form: the shirt. "We've been wearing clothing all our lives," company CEO and founder Stéphane Marceau says. "It's the most natural and therefore the ultimate "wearable" medium." He's got a point, but that isn't what makes OMsignal's shirts special. The garment includes sensors that measure the wearer's heart rate, breathing and movement and pipes all that data to their smartphone via Bluetooth, which can calculate calories burned, workout intensity and other metrics. All this is powered by a removable data module, of course, which can hold a charge for about 30 workouts. Just make sure to remove it before you put the shirt through the wash. Unfortunately the garment isn't cheap (about $200 for pre-orders) -- and only Men's sizes are available at launch -- but the company hopes to create a women's collection soon.
