Designing smart garments has strong interdisciplinary implications, specifically related to user and technical requirements, but also because of the very different applications they have: medicine, sport and fitness, lifestyle monitoring, workplace and job conditions analysis, etc. This paper aims to discuss some user, textile, and technical issues to be faced in sensorized clothes development. In relation to the user, the main requirements are anthropometric, gender-related, and aesthetical. In terms of these requirements, the user’s age, the target application, and fashion trends cannot be ignored, because they determine the compliance with the wearable system. Regarding textile requirements, functional factors—also influencing user comfort—are elasticity and washability, while more technical properties are the stability of the chemical agents’ effects for preserving the sensors’ efficacy and reliability, and assuring the proper duration of the product for the complete life cycle. From the technical side, the physiological issues are the most important: skin conductance, tolerance, irritation, and the effect of sweat and perspiration are key factors for reliable sensing. Other technical features such as battery size and duration, and the form factor of the sensor collector, should be considered, as they affect aesthetical requirements, which have proven to be crucial, as well as comfort and wearability.

PEGASO is a FP7-funded project whose goal is to develop an ICT and mobile-based platform together with an appropriate strategy to tackle the diffusion of obesity and other lifestyle-related illnesses among teenagers. Indeed, the design of an engaging strategy, leveraging a complementary set of technologies, is the approach proposed by the project to promote the adoption of healthy habits such as active lifestyle and balanced nutrition and to effectively counter-fight the emergence of overweight and obesity in the younger population. A technological key element of such a strategy sees the adoption of wearable sensors to monitor teenagers’ activities, which is at the basis of developing awareness about the current lifestyle. This paper describes the experience carried out in the framework of the PEGASO project in developing and evaluating wearable monitoring systems addressed to adolescents. The paper describes the methodological approach based on the co-designing of such a wearable system and the main results that, in the first phase, involved a total of 407 adolescents across Europe in a series of focus groups conducted in three countries for the requirements definition phase. Moreover, it describes an evaluation process of signal reliability during the usage of the wearable system. The main results described here are: (a) a prototype of the standardized experimental protocol that has been developed and applied to test signal reliability in smart garments; (b) the requirements definition methodology through a co-design activity and approach to address user requirements and preferences and not only technological specifications. Such co-design approach is able to support a higher system acceptance and usability together with a sustained adoption of the solution with respect to the traditional technology push system development strategy.

Since many senior citizens in nowadays choose to live alone, providing health care initiates to have its new challenges. Many examples demonstrated that in certain situations our senior citizens happen to be badly injured within their home and not capable of seeking a help. The work presented in this paper is a part of the SMARTA project focused on the wearable and environmental monitoring for the active aging. Sensorized garments and accelerometers fixed on the ground can implement an integrated sensor system for monitoring elderly indoor and outdoor for a smart house and a smart city. The Wearable system consists in a sensorized garment in male and female version and coupled with a small electronic unit allows for the realization of a wearable system for non-intrusive monitoring of individual parameters characterizing the elderly and its physiological state in terms of health and well-being. These sensory systems send data to a body/home gateway that redirects them to a center which concentrates data and implements the monitoring and intervention services. A clinical trial is testing the reliability, the acceptability and the performance of the system for future implementation of new prevention services.

This article describes the coaching strategies of the NESTORE e-coach, a virtual coach for promoting healthier lifestyles in older age. The novelty of the NESTORE project is the definition of a multi-domain personalized pathway where the e-coach accompanies the user throughout different structured and non-structured coaching activities and recommendations. The article also presents the design process of the coaching strategies, carried out including older adults from four European countries and experts from the different health domains, and the results of the tests carried out with 60 older adults in Italy, Spain and The Netherlands.

This paper discusses the user and technical requirements in designing smart garments for biomedical monitoring in several and very different applications: in hospital settings, during activities of daily living (ADL), sport and fitness, home care, working environments. Anthropometric and gender considerations are to be included into design as well as textile requirements like elasticity, washability and chemical agents effects for preserving sensors' efficacy and reliability, and assuring the proper duration of the product for the complete life cycle. Phisiological issues are mainly due to skin conductance (and related operations: cleaning, scrubbing the external layer of dead skin cells, the presence of hair - expecially in male subjects), skin tolerance and irritation, and the effect of sweat and perspiration. All these factors strongly affect the design and technical choices (materials in particular) but aesthetical requirements are proved to be crucial as well as. For this aspect, user's age, target application, and fashiontrend could not be ignored, because they determine the final success of the wearable monitoring approach.