Smart clothes is something we’ve been following for a while now, but Italy-based Smartex seems to be the first serious contender in the market. Cofounded by Danilo De Rossi (a biomedical engineer) the clothing design/engineering company offers equal parts function and fashion with their e-hanced outfits. Most of Smartex’s smart clothes rely on yarn made from strands of conductive steel spun with cotton or polyester fibers, but that look and move very similar to regular cotton blends. De Rossi’s “Wealthy” suit (a loose acronym for “wearable health care system”) has electrodes as well as conductive leads woven in, powered by a tiny embedded lithium battery - yet the one-piece unitard is machine washable and could be easily mistaken for a regular body suit. However, the complexity of making truly wearable smart clothes is not limited to just look and feel. As WIRED explains:

[The unitard] reads the wearer’s vital signs and beams the data wirelessly to a computer. Information on posture and movement is measured by the stress on sensors built into the garment. Other components gauge electrical activity, yielding EKG data. Heat sensors measure temperature. In the not-so-distant future, De Rossi says, health professionals will be able to monitor cardiac patients by unobtrusively tracking their vital signs as they go about their lives.

The challenge in incorporating sensors into clothing — even skin-tight unitards — is that the fabric shifts when the body moves, resulting in sloppy, irregular signals. To deal with this, De Rossi’s team developed software algorithms to clean up the data, along with code to reconstruct the wearer’s movements. These programs are the real genius behind the company’s work.

WIRED: Ready to Ware: Clothes That Look Hip and Track Your Vital Signs, Too