'Smart Clothing' The Next Frontier In Fitness Tracking, Study Says

Key Takeaways'Smart clothing' could soon replace health tracking gadgetsButton-sized sensors on loose clothing can accurately track a person’s movementsThese sensors outperform the skin-tight devices people now strap on, researchers said.WEDNESDAY, Feb. 18, 2026 (HealthDay News) — Health-conscious folks are used to strapping a Fitbit to their wrist or a step counter to their belt before they start walking or jogging.But new research is opening the door to “smart clothing” that would count a person’s steps or track their movement without requiring any extra gadgets, a new study says.Breakthrough research has discovered that tiny devices placed on loose fabric can more accurately record movement than the skin-tight sensors now used, researchers recently reported in the journal Nature Communications.Loose fabric sensors the size of a sewn-on button can capture the body’s movements with 40% more accuracy while requiring 80% less data than sensors stuck to the skin, researchers found.“When we think about technology that tracks movement — like a Fitbit on your wrist or the suits actors wear to play [computer-generated imagery] characters — we had thought that the sensors need to be tight against the body to produce the most accurate results. The common belief is that if a sensor is loose, the data will be ‘noisy’ or messy,” said senior researcher Matthew Howard, a reader in engineering at King’s College London.“However, our research has proven over multiple experiments that loose, flowing clothing actually makes motion tracking significantly more accurate,” he said in a news release. “Meaning, we could move away from 'wearable tech' that feels like medical equipment and toward 'smart clothing' — like a simple button or pin on a dress — that tracks your health while you feel completely natural going about your day.”For the new study, researchers tested sensors on a wide range of different fabrics, using both humans and robots to perform a variety of different movements.They found that devices pinned to loose fabrics were able to detect movements more quickly and more accurately, and needed less movement data to make predictions.It turns out that loose fabric acts like a “mechanical amplifier” that makes movement easier to detect, researchers said.“When you start to move your arm, a loose sleeve doesn't just sit there; it folds, billows and shifts in complex ways — reacting more sensitively to the movements than a tighter fitting sensor,” Howard said.Devices on loose fabric also were capable of distinguishing between subtle, barely noticeable differences in movement, researchers found.“Sometimes, a patient's movements are too small for a tight wristband to catch and therefore we can’t always get the most accurate data on how conditions like Parkinson’s are affecting people’s everyday lives,” said researcher Irene Di Giulio, a senior lecturer in anatomy and biomechanics at King’s College London.“Through this approach we could ‘amplify’ people’s movement, which will help capture them even when they are smaller than typical abled-bodied movements,” she said in a news release. “This could allow us to track people in the comfort of their own homes or a care home, in their everyday clothing. It could become easier for doctors to monitor their patients, as well as medical researchers to gather vital data needed to inform our understanding of these conditions and develop new therapies including wearable technologies that cater for these kinds of disabilities.”These sorts of movement trackers also could be used to develop smarter robots, Howard said.“A lot of robotics research is about learning from human behavior for robots to mimic, but to do this you need huge amounts of data collected from every day human movements, and not many people are willing to strap up in a Lycra suit and go about their daily business,” he said.“This research offers the possibility of attaching discreet sensors to everyday clothing, so we can start to collect the internet-scale of human behavior data needed to revolutionize the field of robotics,” Howard said.More informationBrown University has more on fitness trackers and health.SOURCE: King’s College London, news release, Feb. 12, 2026 .What This Means For YouIn the future, fitness trackers might be sewn onto clothing and come with the shirt or blouse you’re buying..Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

'Smart Clothing' The Next Frontier In Fitness Tracking, Study Says

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