Smart Sport Textiles: Measuring Movement Where It Matters

Smart Sport Textiles represent the next step in wearable technology: sensing movement and muscle activity directly from clothing. Instead of relying on external devices or rigid sensors, this project integrates textile-based sensors seamlessly into sportswear, enabling unobtrusive and continuous movement analysis during real-life activity.

The Smart Sport Textiles project (SST) focuses on combining e-textiles, biomechanics, and data analytics to capture high-quality movement data in a way that is comfortable, scalable, and suitable for daily use. By embedding sensors into garments, we can measure parameters such as posture, joint movement, and muscle activation without restricting the wearer.

Kinetic Analysis contributes its expertise in movement science, signal processing, and algorithm development to translate raw textile sensor data into meaningful, actionable insights. The challenge lies not only in collecting data, but in ensuring that measurements are valid, reliable, and interpretable across different users and movement contexts.

Applications range from sports performance monitoring and injury prevention to rehabilitation and long-term health monitoring. Because smart textiles are wearable as normal clothing, they open the door to longitudinal monitoring outside the lab — exactly where movement behaviour truly happens.

By integrating technology directly into textiles, Smart Sport Textiles move measurement closer to the body, the environment, and everyday life. This project underlines our ambition to make movement analysis more accessible, scalable, and embedded in real-world practice.