The era of stupid clothing has ended

That shirt you're wearing; is it doing anything except keeping you warm? What a waste, now that Smartex is here.

The Italian firm is developing clothing with imbedded sensors to monitor your body functions. For athletes, the garb can provide real-time data on breathing, perspiration, heart activity, electrolytes, oxygen uptake, CO2 exhalation, temperature, all the details needed to allow them to work safely at a target pace. The breakthrough has a vastly larger scope of applications, though -- monitoring health care patients, employees in stressful jobs, soldiers, anyone for whom continuous and immediate body data is crucial.

The company is also working to adopt the tech to other applications, including smart car seats. One of the most intriguing is for dancers, where clothing can not only record physical changes but also orientation in three dimensions. If I understand it correctly, such a suit could record a dancer's performance. The suit could then teach another suit-wearing dancer to duplicate the performance by teaching him to match the movements in space, like paper dance steps taken to exponential levels.

Although this clothing is still in the prototype stage, it's obvious the era of stupid clothing is finally coming to an end. Now we have a new definition of dressing smart.