Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Rogelio Legaspi, Journalist, AOPG

Wearable smart devices are not new to the market. There are smartwatches, glasses and even shoes that can track your movements. As time goes on, we can expect more of the things we wear to be embedded with intelligence, as this recent announcement shows.

ZTE, together with Italian organisation AccYouRate that develops wearable tech, has recently announced an addition to such devices in the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2021 – a smart t-shirt enabled with 5G. The said fabric includes various components to track GPS data, humidity, temperature, and with the help of ZTE, a 5G antenna responsible for the collection of vital information and sending it to a central control centre.

The said 5G component is housed by a control unit, a Smart Tag which incorporates the AccYouRate logo and has the task of receiving and sending data. The main purpose of the device is to provide users with a connected and intelligent clothing to monitor health more than what a usual wearable can provide.

For Francesco Rocca, National President of the Italian Red Cross, it is important to speed up community care and provide the right to healthcare, which can be achievable with devices such as the smart t-shirt. He added that organisations can bridge this gap with digital solidarity, hence the importance of 5G.

The t-shirt can enable the detection of bio-vital parameters never before detected by textile sensors, such as a “real” electrocardiogram, the analysis of respiratory acts and sweat components, muscle effort, body temperature, and allows the transmission via ultra-fast 5G ZTE connection to health and control centres, as well as to individual users.

“I believe this is going to bring very important benefits for public healthcare, even out of our current imagination,” added Hu Kun, President, ZTE Western Europe in the hybrid session held during the MWC 2021.

The project has been in development since 2018 and ZTE is planning to launch a test action at their 5G innovation and research centre located in L’Aquila, Italy in the next few months.

(0)(0)