As in the prior posts, the meta discussion and detailed discussion on phase change material, we’re going to delve into conductive clothing today. Conductive clothing is quite simply cloth with some sort of conductive material (most commonly a metal) woven into it as a thread.

A recent article describes a shirt with metal (stainless steel in this case) in the weave used as the principal monitoring device for heart patients; it is capable of acting as the sensor array for an electrocardiogram. If you’ve never experienced this, I can assure you that a shirt is preferrable to the adhesive sensors applied directly to the skin (especially if you’re hirsute like me…)

Another common use of conductive clothing is in the electric powerline maintenance business. These brave souls work with live high voltage powerlines (up to 800kV AC) to perform preventative maintenance and repairs as necessary. A clothing shell with conductive material coupled with other equipment allows the person to become charged with the current passing through the garment rather than the person.

An emerging use similar to the monitoring shirt mentioned above is the “smart shirt” by Sensatex. It’s a combination of conductive and nano technology where the shirt effectively becomes a system bus with multi-capable sensor arrays to track parameters like heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, caloric burn, body fat, and UV exposure.

“Smart Shirt”


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