This paper isn’t about smart clothing, really, even though there are long descriptions of the things you have to think about when you’re embedding wires and sensors in fabric (how often can you put that shirt through the washer, and how about the dryer?) and the types of measurements you need to collect to make a piece of personalized clothing (see Table 2, p. 832).

Rather, it’s about what the authors call the “body area network,” or in other words, a mobile healthcare platform constructed from the mobile Internet, cloud computing, and big data analytics.

Some parts of this network, such as low-power Bluetooth and WiFi, already exist or could be cobbled together from existing technologies. Plus, cloud computing could be “the center of all [health monitoring] functions and services ... while [a] mobile phone [app] is the bridge of these services” (p. 837).

There are problems, of course. As you scatter the sensor nodes around a person’s body, you risk interference from human motion, environmental noise, and even embedded equipment such as pacemakers.

Why is it important to look to smart clothing for health monitoring as opposed to fitness tracking, which is already popular in many demographics?

The authors make a strong case: Worldwide, they say, the proportion of the population aged 60 or over will increase from 12 percent in 2015 to 22 percent by 2050. The situation in Asia (the authors are from China and Taiwan) is even worse: In Japan, the proportion of the elderly population is now 30 percent. Taking care of an increasing elderly and fragile population may be impossible without the help of medical monitoring systems.