Ready to Test a 'SmartShirt'?

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a very brief article, Health Data Management reports that Sensatex Inc. is looking for beta testers for its SmartShirt system. These fully washable shirts are using nanotechnology to weave a conductive fiber grid into the cotton fabric to monitor your movements or your heart rate and transmitted wirelessly to a central computer. If the tests are successful, these shirts could be used to remotely check old people living alone, but also soldiers in the field or athletes. Read more for additional details and pictures of these 'smart' shirts."

Can't wait to see this stuff.

[farker haiku]

Frankly, I'm signing up to be a beta tester for several reasons. First, wireless anything is attractive to me.

Biometric information is wirelessly transmitted to a personal computer and ultimately, the Internet.

And I'd like to sniff the packets just to see what they are actually sending/what kind of encryption they are using/etc. Secondly, as someone who is trying to lose weight via an exercise program (I mean program literally - I play the dance game In The Groove) the following is also attractive:

The Athletic SmartShirt System allows the comfortable measuring and/or monitoring of individual biometric data, such as heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, caloric burn,

No, I'd rather not

[Pichu0102]

Considering all the abuses of privacy going on recently, who knows who gets to see the data collected by the smartshirts? What privacy are we getting about the data collected by the smartshirts? And would they even be required by law to keep that data confidental?
There's too many privacy concerns, so until I feel secure enough in knowing that my private health information is not being sold or even placed into a national database, there's no way in hell I'm using those shirts.

Here's a thought

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

If these things can monitor your movements, how about making a set of tights that can be used for motion capture.

DDT

[grolschie]

I think we're set for another DDT-style disaster here.

Yeah sure. Is DDT actually safe for humans? [straightdope.com]

Re:New dangers?

[Gooba42]

You are aware the shirt you're (presumably) wearing now is constructed of nano-scaled materials, right? They're called "molecules".

Why you're worried about *a* nanofiber when you're inundated with billions and trillions of nanoparticles a day from wind, water and earth I don't quite grasp. Not even touching on the fact that nanotubes are based on buckyballs terrestrially found in smoke which is an ingredient in the smog you breathe every moment of every day, why are you specifically concerned about this shirt?

Any why, pray tell, are you worried about *a* fiber in your *lung* where it alone will cause virtually no damage when a particle this small could just as easily wind up in your brain where a single fiber could conceivably cause a real problem by messing with your synapses?