My name is Valeria, I am a PhD student at ETH and my research is on textile wearable devices for mobile health applications. Together with my colleagues at the Biomedical and Mobile Health Technology group in the Department of Health Sciences and Technologies, we develop smart clothes (also known as e-textiles) to track health and fitness.

A few weeks ago, we had a great stage to showcase one of our technologies – a smart knee sleeve – at the UCI Road Cycling and Para-cycling Championship in Zurich. It was really interesting to see how we caught the attention of different passers-by, young and old, sport lovers to “couch potatoes”. The idea of having a simple piece of clothing tracking one’s movement looked appealing to many of them, from the amateur runner with “that tiny pain in the knee after a few kilometers”, to the passionate cyclist riding up and down mountain passes on weekends.

Many people (more than what we expected!) gifted us with their time by participating in our study, curious to try out the smart knee sleeve. We had them cycle on a stationary bike for 5 minutes at easy pace or – for those in for a challenge – with increasing load to reach exhaustion. While catching their breath on the bike, most of our participants asked about the technology and its practical applications: it was quite rewarding for us to see how most people could relate to the usefulness of monitoring movement to avoid incorrect posture and/or dynamics during a training or in the process of rehabilitation after an injury.

We could see our system in operation “in the wild”: we had no shortage of troubleshooting and quick fixes on the spot to spice up the experience (lots of stitching and fixing behind the scenes). No lack of fun moments either, as in “we do not have a big enough size for this giant quad muscle”, or “will this person ever get to exhaustion, or can they cycle forever?”.

It has been nine intense days of hard work, but well rewarded by the satisfaction of bringing the technologies we develop outside of the lab and see them in action, actually being as “comfortable and suited for everyday use” as we like claiming on our scientific publications.

What are you waiting for? Don’t settle for heart rate and step count only and look into how your body moves with our smart clothes!