Smart Clothing Sales May Touch 10 Mn By 2020

The wearable technology today, with its various biometric sensors, is already moving out from our wrists. It will predictably show up in different parts of our clothing in the coming days. That day is not too far states a new report from Tractica, which predicts consumers will be buying more than 10 million pieces of smart clothing yearly by 2020.

At present some of these clothes have an athletic appeal. Sports enthusiasts are using sensor-infused shirts, shorts, sports bras, and socks that provide biometric data on muscle activity, breathing rate, and heart activity zones. These data set of cannot be tracked by fitness bands or smart watches. For instance, the report states just 140,000 of the garments moved in 2013, almost all of them athletic gear.

Over the next 5 years, smart clothing will begin to look less like athletic pieces and more like casual and corporate wear. “The ultimate wearable computer is a piece of smart clothing that one can wear as a garment or a body sensor that can track and measure specific vital signs,” said Aditya Kaul, Research Director, Tractica stating that“Both of these device categories are designed to seamlessly integrate with users’ daily lives.”

While body sensor shipments will decrease from 3 million units in 2013 to 1.2 million by 2017, Tractica says, they will rise again to 3.1 million units in 2020. The reason for the downward dip at 2017 is because heart rate monitors will decline in unit volume before newer devices like baby and pregnancy monitors, headbands, posture monitors, and 3D trackers begin to build momentum.

Gartner predicts that wearable electronic devices for fitness shipments will reach 68.1 million units in 2015, down from 70 million units in 2014. The reason for the dip is the rise of smartgarment market.

“Because smartshirts and other smartgarments can hold more sensors closer to the skin, they can collect more information and produce better data, like the full wave of the heart beat rather than just the pulse,” said Gartner research director Angela McIntyre told the Guardian.

Gartner has made a more ambitious forecast that shipments of smart garment will touch 26 million, 7 million more than smart wristbands that same year.

Sports watches and chest straps are well established, compared with smart wristbands first popularized by the Jawbone Up, which launched in 2011. However, Gartner believes that the smart garment product category has the greatest potential for growth going forward because the category is emerging from the testing phase and smart shirts are available to athletes and coaches of professional teams.