I’ve been reading about connected clothing. Know what that is? Think about that Fitbit on your wrist, but move the functionality to your shirt, and you’ll get the idea.

Connected clothing, or “smart clothing,” has sensors, RFID tags, etc embedded in them that monitor things, much like that Fitbit does.

I’ve read about clothing that does quite a range of things, including:

• double-checking the manufacturing history of a piece of clothing
• having an embedded payment/credit card system “up your sleeve”
• baby monitors built into hats and socks
• shirts, shorts, and shoes that do all types of health and fitness monitoring

The jacket pic in this post is a Levi’s jacket that interacts with your smartphone using Bluetooth. It lets you do things like get directions from Google Maps or change the song.

The thing I like about this the most? It’s just the beginning. It’s hard to imagine what your clothes will be doing in the next 10-20 years!

Want to read more about connected clothing? Here are some articles for you!

• Google and Levi’s Are Now Making Connected Jean Jackets
• 10 Billion Items Of Connected Clothing: The Internet Of Things Just Became A Lot More Fashionable
• The best smart clothing: From biometric shirts to contactless payment jackets
• Threads with benefits: WTF is the ‘Internet of Clothing’?
• Internet of pants? This ultrathin thread could make your clothes part of the IoT (ok – the article is interesting, but I have to admit – I partly included this just because of the title. “Internet of Pants” – ha!).

Pic from the Google and Levi’s article above.