WIRE up your baby bump in style. The latest in smart maternity clothes can track the vital signs of pregnant women via conductive silver fibres woven discreetly into the fabric.
The clothing line, designed by Blake Uretsky, a fashion student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, aims to help pregnant women keep tabs on their changing bodies.
"Maternity wear is a market that needs to be revamped aesthetically," says Uretsky, who thinks wearable tech often struggles to be both attractive and useful.
To learn more about pregnancy fashions, Uretsky donned a fake bump and visited several stores to try on their clothing. She also interviewed 30 local mothers about their experiences with maternity wear.
The result was "B" Maternity Wearables, a line of 10 pieces including blouses, trousers, skirts and even an evening gown. The clothing comes in neutral colours and adjusts to a growing bump.
Silver wires made by Pennsylvania firm Notable Biomaterials are threaded through the empire waistline and register the wearer's temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. A small device on the belt relays this data back to a smartphone app. With the help of doctors, users can set the app to ping them if their vital signs veer out of whack – perhaps because of stress or inactivity. Earlier this month, the clothing line won an award from the YMA Fashion Scholarship Fund, a non-profit in New York City.
Most pregnant women don't need to constantly monitor their vital signs, says Julia Walsh, a maternal health expert at the University of California at Berkeley. But women with high-risk pregnancies or who enjoy tracking devices like the Fitbit, for example, could get a lot out of it.
Owen Montgomery, an obstetrician at Drexel University in Philadelphia, working on a wearable fetal monitor, can see doctors getting behind the concept too: "If you could put on your maternity garment, and then have your blood pressure sent electronically to your doctor's office every morning, that's really sweet."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Smart clothes track health in pregnancy"
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