Over the past years we have seen quite some wearable technology concepts and products around babies, ranging from music radiating maternity wear for the unborn, allowing unborn babies to tweet their first movements or baby clothing that changes color when baby’s temperature rises.

The latest high-tech baby wear takes the ‘always connected’ term of your generation to a new level as mothers can check in real time on a cellphone about baby’s well-being.

Exmovere Holdings, a biomedical engineering company developed the Exmobaby sleep suit fitted with washable conductive bio-sensor textile that connects to a Zigbee wireless transceiver to send biometric data like heartbeat, emotional state and behavior to a cellphone or computer. The information will be presented in form of icons – cute and intuitive idea.

In this case I don’t see a ‘Big Brother’ like monitoring sneaking up in our society but to some degree a quite usefully wearable technology application that could give a little peace of mind especially to young and inexperienced parents or in cases where especial attention around the clock has to be given to the little one.

Exmovere is planning a first limited edition market intro of 1000 units in early 2011 for ‘selected buyers from a waiting list‘.

The Exmobaby sleep suit set will include an Exmobaby garment, a Zigbee transceiver, PC and cell phone monitoring software and six months of online service.

I like the product concept, especially the fact that this is not some demonstration kit but a product soon to be in the market, even if it is only in a very limited edition at first.

[source: medGadget via Gizmag]

We have highlighted many times before the usefulness of wearable technologies in the field of medical care, to improve the living quality of those who need assistance and for the improved service quality of those who take care.

Australian based Simavita came up with a solution primarily for the aging population with increased risk of incontinence, persons that can not hold it back to pee.

The SIMsystem™ (‘Smart Incontinence Management’) consists of underpants equipped with a disposable pad with a wetness sensor that records the incontinence data and sends it to a central computer via ZigBee® standard which is a very low-power and low-range wireless applications.

This low power technology eliminates the risk of any electrical shock and has been approved for body-worn products.

As the incontinence event happens a text alert is transmitted through the care facility’s paging system alerting the care taker to jump into action.

Medical care and lifestyle improving aspects of life offer such a wide and interesting field for wearable technology, it comes to no surprise to see developments like this coming up in the years ahead.

Texting underpants? Why not, it all comes down to the usefulness (or the lack off) such groundbreaking innovations.

[via: Physorg]

Adidas is taking the lead when it comes to highly fashionable and very smart fitness clothing. After the launch of the AdiStar Fusion selection in 2007, Adidas expanded their smart fitness apparel collection adding different styles for men and women.

The latest collection of the Adidas Fusion and the new miCoach fitness apparel range use textile electrodes seamless integrated into the shirts and tops fabric taking away the ‘not so favorable’ look when using HRM and the highly uncomfortable wear feel of conventional chest-strap like HRM devices.

Adidas teamed also up with Samsung Electronics and made the intelligent fitness apparel range compatible with the miCoach training system that includes a quad band slider phone from Samsung acting as a fitness trainer, a heart rate monitor tuning into the rhythm of the user’s body, a stride sensor to measure speed and distance while running (when the miCoach sports shoe) and a web workout journal to help people design and keep track of fitness programs.

A highly sophisticated system linking the data collected from the smart clothing to online services for performance tracking and sharing with team members of friends.

An almost perfect scenario which I can envision interactive, intelligent clothing will be heading.

Adidas smart fitness apparel also work with Polar’s Wearlink sensor so if you own already a Polar system you just need to select one of the gorgeous looking fitness fashion shirts and tops and you are good to go.

There are many online shops selling the Adidas smart fitness fashion collection so we just give one example of where to start looking around.

Upgrade your fitness wardrobe to be ready for the the coming spring/summer season.

Adidas is the first place to check out when it comes to truly smart, intelligent fitness apparel and shoes.

If you wonder what I am talking about today – keep on reading. Bellysonic® is a soft speaker device that enables ‘soon to be moms’ to share their music with the baby in the womb.

The Bellysonic is the perfect way for an expectant mom to participate in their baby’s sensory development, and to enrich their pregnancy experience using a natural, sound therapy approach.

Music has effected human emotions for many years. It can be a soothing therapy for a stressful day, or a non-aggressive release for pent up emotion.

So why should music not have similar relaxing benefits for babies even-though they are not yet born? I have done some research around the topic of the effect of music to unborn babies. There is one side which says nothing is scientifically proven but this does not mean the other side is wrong in believing in the positive influence of music in the womb.

The most often heard effect of music for unborn babies is it will have a similar relaxation and soothing effect like we grown-up have by listening to relaxing music.

An interesting observation is also that babies which ‘listened’ to certain music for the last 3 month of pregnancy could still remember this music when they celebrated their first birthday.

I have my serious doubts that listening to music in the womb makes smart as other ‘studies’ suggest but I am sure that letting your unborn baby listen to music in soft sound setting will not harm either.

In whatever way you might see this, I like the unique idea of the Bellysonic by giving a soft touch to the hard plastic and metal world.

Adjustable belt, made of 100% organic sherpa cotton and 100% natural cotton takes care for extra softness. Easy to use fasteners allows freedom of movement for relaxation, mobility and comfort.

The Bellysonic® stereo speaker pouch comes with two built-in mini stereo speakers and headphone splitter allowing you and your baby to listen simultaneously.

Mom’s Interactive pregnancy Fashion and Babies first iPod Bellysonic is available for example by amazon.com for $49.95

The Vital Jacket® is an intelligent wearable garment that is able to continuously monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) wave and Heart Rate as used in medical environment, high performance sports and fitness.

The company behind this futuristic Jacket/Shirt is Biodevices, S.A., a spin-off from IEETA (Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro / University of Aveiro, Portugal) with the mission of developing and commercializing biomedical solutions for diagnosis and monitoring support.

The Vital Jacket® is a wearable vital signs monitoring system that joins textiles with microelectronics. It was designed and developed to be a usable pragmatic approach for different clinical and normal life scenarios, in hospitals, home or on the move, that need continuous or frequent high quality vital signs monitoring.

The benefit of Bio-monitoring clothing is obvious: more freedom of movement and independence from stationary treatment for patients or elderly who need special care and quality data collection in high performance sport as well as for fitness enthusiasts.

There are currently two versions available, the HWM100 that stores data on a SD memory card for post-analysis on a PC. This version allows long term monitoring. Users can define heart rate limits and will be alerted through a vibration alarm embedded in the T-Shirt.

The second version is the HWM200 that allows realtime visualization where data is sent via Bluetooth to a PDA or smart phone.

Both VitalJacket versions are ready for pre-order at a price of €399.- / $635.44 (excluding PDA) on VitalJacket’s Website. Shipment is indicated as begin of 2008 so it should be very soon.

The most visible use of Wearable Electronic technologies is in consumer products like clothing and bags. The value here is convenience, adding individuality or giving interactive decoration options.

But the potential of Wearable Electronic technologies go far beyond the fashion market. Take for example the health care and medical sector. Nobody likes to get sick or having health problems but this is a fact of our life.

Being in such situation puts already a great strain on a patients life quality. The need of measuring and monitoring body functions means being stationary or having the need to go the doctor or hospital for monitoring. Most of the time highly visible and uncomfortable devices has to be worn during the monitoring of body functions.

This might change soon as a newly formed consortium, comprising 18 research, academic, industrial and medical organizations from 9 different European countries and China, will work to improve the quality of life for coronary heart disease and heart failure patients.

The project name is ‘HeartCycle‘ and aims to create a ‘patient loop’ that gives patients continuous feedback on their state of health, their progress towards achieving health status milestones, plus motivational tips and suggestions for a healthy lifestyle and diet.

Monitoring each patient’s condition will be achieved using a combination of unobtrusive bio-sensors built into the patient’s clothing or bed sheet.

Sensing of an individual patient’s physical exertion, body orientation and ambient environment will provide additional information so that the system can put the monitoring data into context.

The HeartCycle project, for which Philips Research is acting as project coordinator, is one of the largest biomedical and health care research projects within the European Union (EU) and will run for four years.

More infos can be found on www.research.philips.com