Envision. Photo by Sadjad Frogh
Wearable health technology has long been dominated by wrist-worn devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers. But the future of health monitoring is expanding far beyond the wrist into the clothes and accessories we use every day. Wearable clothing, equipped with smart sensors and conductive fibers, as well as smart glasses, can capture a broader spectrum of health metrics seamlessly and continuously, without relying on separate devices.
One of the most prominent examples is Envision Glasses, which transform visual information into speech, providing independent access to the environment for people with blindness or low vision. These smart glasses can instantly read text (including handwriting), describe scenes, recognize faces, colors, cash, and objects, and even support hands‑free video calls via voice command. Built on Google Glass Enterprise hardware, these glasses update continuously with features like GPT‑4–based assistance, enabling users to engage confidently with their surroundings.
In this article, we explore how wearable clothing works, the advantages it offers over traditional devices, the challenges it still faces, and the opportunities it creates for healthcare providers, insurers, and digital health innovators.
How Wearable Clothing Works
In general, wearable clothing integrates advanced sensors, conductive threads, and microelectronics directly into fabrics, enabling continuous, unobtrusive measurement of vital signs throughout the day. Unlike external devices, these smart textiles are integrated seamlessly into garments, turning everyday clothing into monitoring systems. They can capture a wide spectrum of metrics, such as:
- Heart activity (ECG and continuous heart rate), offering higher-fidelity readings than wrist devices.
- Respiration rate, lung capacity, and breathing patterns, useful for chronic respiratory conditions or athletic training.
- Muscle activity (EMG) to track performance, rehabilitation progress, or detect early signs of fatigue.
- Body temperature and hydration levels, allowing early detection of dehydration, fever, or other stress markers. Check our blog post on Electrodermal Activity!
- Posture, gait, and movement quality, critical for fall prevention in elderly care and performance analysis in sports.
Because the sensors are distributed across multiple points of the body, clothing-based systems provide richer, more accurate insights than smartwatches, which are limited to the wrist and often miss broader physiological signals.
What Are The Advantages of Wearable Clothing
Wearable clothing offers a number of compelling advantages over traditional wrist-based devices. These benefits extend beyond convenience to include accuracy, comfort, and personalization, making smart textiles an attractive option for the future of health monitoring.
- Continuous monitoring: Clothing can be worn throughout the day, providing uninterrupted data collection with fewer charging breaks compared to wrist devices. This makes long-term monitoring more practical, especially for chronic disease management and elderly care. For more information on continuous monitoring, read our blog post here!
- Comfort and discretion: Because sensors are seamlessly embedded into everyday clothing, users experience less device fatigue, reduced stigma, and a higher likelihood of consistent use. Unlike visible wearables, smart textiles blend naturally into personal style.
- Broader data collection: Garments can capture a wider range of physiological signals than wrist devices alone, including respiration, posture, muscle strain, and hydration. This multi-point measurement delivers richer context and more accurate insights.
- Integration into lifestyle: Health monitoring becomes part of daily life without extra effort. Users no longer need to remember to wear or charge a device; the clothing itself becomes the health tracker.
- Personalization and adaptability: By collecting more diverse data, clothing-based systems can adapt recommendations and insights to an individual’s body, activity level, and health goals, offering more tailored care than wrist-only wearables.
What Are The Challenges
While wearable clothing promises transformative health monitoring, several obstacles need to be addressed before widespread adoption can occur. These challenges span engineering, usability, economics, and regulation, and each requires careful innovation and collaboration across industries:
- Durability and washability: Smart textiles must withstand repeated wear, stretching, and regular washing cycles without degrading. Current prototypes often lose functionality after a certain number of washes, highlighting the need for durable conductive fibers and protective designs that can endure daily life.
- Data accuracy: Clothing moves with the body, creating potential signal noise from shifting fabrics, sweat, or environmental conditions. Developers must ensure that readings remain reliable across diverse activities, body types, and use cases. Robust calibration and adaptive algorithms are essential for trustworthy results.
- Cost and accessibility: Producing sensor-embedded textiles is still expensive, often requiring specialized materials and manufacturing processes. Until costs decrease, smart clothing may remain out of reach for many users, limiting its impact on healthcare equity. Scalable, affordable production methods will be key to broader adoption.
- Standardization and interoperability: At present, there are no universal standards for textile sensors or how they connect with existing health platforms. Without standardization, data may remain siloed, reducing its usefulness.
- User adoption and trust: Beyond technical issues, users must feel comfortable and confident wearing sensor-embedded clothing. Concerns about privacy, data ownership, and fashion design all play a role in determining whether wearable clothing will be embraced or resisted by consumers and patients.
Overcoming these challenges will require not just advances in technology, but also collaboration between healthcare providers, insurers, textile manufacturers, and regulators to ensure wearable clothing delivers value in real-world contexts
Opportunities in Healthcare and Digital Health
Wearable clothing could become a transformative tool for healthcare, wellness, and prevention. Its applications span across multiple areas, each offering unique benefits and addressing specific needs:
- Chronic disease management: Clothing that tracks heart or respiratory conditions can provide clinicians with continuous streams of data, enabling earlier interventions, medication adjustments, and personalized care plans. For example, garments that monitor breathing rhythms could help detect asthma flare-ups before they become acute. We have covered chronic disease management in detail here!
- Sports and rehabilitation: Athletes and recovering patients can benefit from textiles that measure muscle strain, recovery rates, and posture alignment. This allows trainers and physiotherapists to fine-tune training loads, identify overuse injuries early, and design precise rehabilitation programs.
- Elderly care: For older adults, wearable clothing provides seamless monitoring of falls, activity levels, and vital signs without intrusive devices. Subtle detection of gait changes or declining mobility can trigger timely interventions, supporting aging-in-place and reducing hospitalizations.
- Population health: On a larger scale, aggregated data from everyday use of smart clothing can be anonymized to reveal population-level trends. This data can support preventive care programs, public health research, and policymaking, offering insights into lifestyle patterns, risk factors, and intervention effectiveness.
The opportunities are not limited to these areas; wearable clothing also opens new avenues for insurers, digital health innovators, and healthcare systems to design more proactive, preventive, and personalized models of care.
How Thryve Fits In
The rise of wearable clothing illustrates a broader truth: the future of healthcare will be defined not just by collecting more data, but by turning that data into meaningful, actionable insights. Yet the potential can only be realized if the data is properly integrated, standardized, and secured. Without that foundation, even the most innovative garments risk adding complexity rather than clarity.
At Thryve, we specialize in building that foundation. Our API already supports integration from hundreds of wearable devices and medical sensors, and as textile technology matures, we are ready to bring those data streams into our unified infrastructure. We offer features such as:
- Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
- Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
- GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements.
We enable healthcare providers, insurers, and innovators to unlock the full value of smart clothing without the burden of building and maintaining costly infrastructure themselves.
Ready to explore how wearable clothing data can strengthen your digital health strategy?
Book a demo with Thryve today!
