Sensors embedded in clothing have been commercialized for years, but the big aha moment has yet to be realized, especially alongside the success of smartphones worn on wrists and other wearable electronics devices.
Timm Smith, CTO at SWNR/Voormi described the potential for the tech at a crowded half-day conference at Sensors Converge 2025 on Tuesday in Santa Clara, CA. He appeared alongside other professionals to discuss “challenges and opportunities for printed, flexible, stretchable, and e-based sensors” chaired by industry veteran Roger Grace.
With 100 billion garments produced globally each year and 8 billion people on earth, “there’s a massive opportunity” for sensors embedded in clothing, Smith said. He used the staggering number of heat-related deaths each year (489,000 globally, according to Lancet) as a prime reason for industrial companies and armies to embed temperature sensors in uniforms.
Asked what has held back the technology, Smith told me the biggest objection is data privacy. A union might object if a company monitored worker health in that way, he said. Or, a professional football player might be concerned a heart condition could be revealed, putting his career in jeopardy. Greater acceptance of the value of the technology for safety of workers may eventually overcome such concerns he said.
He dismissed worries that sensors activated by electricity sitting next to a person’s skin could be posing a significant challenge for adoption, noting that smart watches worn on wrists and conducting current from an internal battery have become popular.
One other speaker at the conference, Rob Podoloff, CTO at Tekscan and a lecturer at MIT, described his experience in the 1980s in trying to interest dentists in a device to detect teeth occlusions in a dental patient’s mouth. The dentists couldn’t accept that the product was safe, partly because even personal computers had barely emerged at the time and wasn’t well understood.
Podoloff made the case that developing sensors alone is not nearly enough to ensure the success of wearable and flexible sensing technology, with the need for software to interpret a sensor’s position as it moves in a garment or glove worn by a person. “You can’t talk about sensors in isolation,” he said, while holding up a flexbile sensor the length of his arm. “With 2500 sensing cells in this sensor, you need software to make it usable.”
Tekscan’s technology is used in Dr. Scholl’s kiosks in drug stores to sense pressure points on a person’s feet to help pick an appropriate in-shoe orthotic device to ease pain. More recently, the company has been working with the US Army on a glove equipped with 960 sensing cells in the palm to accurately detect what muscles are used the most when a person grips a gun and fires. Data from the sensors could help develop ways to reduce fatigue.