Smart Clothing: Connecting Human with Clouds and Big Data for Sustainable Health Monitoring

Traditional wearable devices have various shortcomings, such as uncomfortableness for long-term wearing, and insufficient accuracy, etc. Thus, health monitoring through traditional wearable devices is hard to be sustainable. In order to obtain healthcare big data by sustainable health monitoring, we design “Smart Clothing”, facilitating unobtrusive collection of various physiological indicators of human body. To provide pervasive intelligence for smart clothing system, mobile healthcare cloud platform is constructed by the use of mobile internet, cloud computing and big data analytics. This paper introduces design details, key technologies and practical implementation methods of smart clothing system. Typical applications powered by smart clothing and big data clouds are presented, such as medical emergency response, emotion care, disease diagnosis, and real-time tactile interaction. Especially, electrocardiograph signals collected by smart clothing are used for mood monitoring and emotion detection. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make smart clothing ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.