Samsung’s smart clothes are wearables you’d actually wear
LAS VEGAS — The man talking to me looks dapper in his grey suit. As we chat, he takes a smartphone out of his pocket and waves it over an enlarged button with gray markings on his left cuff.
What he’s just done, he says, is silence his phone of notifications. He tells me the idea is to provide an easy way to put your phone into “do not disturb” mode when, say, you’re about to head into a meeting. The button, which also makes for a nice lapel pin, can also be configured via the accompanying app to share contact information with other people’s phones in the same way, eliminating the need to carry a business card.
This is Samsung’s Smart Suit concept, which the company showed off at CES 2016, and, technologically, it’s not impressive. It’s really just an NFC tag sewn onto a suit, so it’s a far cry from “smart fabrics” like Google’s Project Jacquard.
What makes the Smart Suit special is that it’s part of a family of smart wearables, and represents a shift in thinking about the category for Samsung. The suit joins the Welt smart belt and Body Compass 2.0 athletic wear as a group of wearable devices that all look and feel like clothes you’d actually wear.
If the Smart Suit is the low-watt bulb of the group, the Body Compass is the prodigy. Samsung showed both a tank top and pair of athletic pants at its booth, and were it not for the bottle-cap size metal nubs on each, I would have thought they were just like any sportswear you might get a Foot Locker or Lululemon.
Those nubs hide a processor and battery, which power the sensors beneath the fabric. Since the sensors are in the clothes themselves, the garments can easily measure things like heart rate, stance and even body fat levels. The downside is they’re not machine washable — you have to clean them by hand.
Of course, the Body Compass has an accompanying app and it can give you real-time analysis and feedback on your workout: Correcting your form and alerting you when you’ve rested too long. It can even detect exactly what kind of exercise you’re doing and count your reps for you. It gives feedback through your phone, but sending it to your smartwatch is part of the plan.
The Welt, or Wellness Belt, is a little more simple, but arguably just as useful. Essentially the same concept as the Belty belt we saw at last year’s CES, the Welt will detect when you eat a big meal and automatically give your waist a little more breathing room. Now you can chow those burritos in totally comfort.
Rounding out the collection is the slim Sol bag, really more of a sleeve with solar panels. Although the bag is about the size of a small laptop, it’s meant to charge a tablet or phone — a handy way to keep your gadgets powered when you’re out and about.
The common thread in Samsung smart concepts is that, if you weren’t told they had tech built in, you’d never know it. Even the solar panels could just be a fancy pattern. They’re a mixed bag, surely — and they're still concepts at this point, developed by Samsung's C&T division — but as a whole they’re an indicator of a welcome new normal in wearables: Actually being wearable.
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