Ready for Touchscreen Shirts?

ByLianne Martha Laroya Hours

Get ready for another technological invention that will blow your mind: Touchscreen shirts may be on the Horizon

If you are like most people who swear they can’t live without their smartphones, then these touchscreen shirts may just be the perfect fit for you. Think about this for a minute: instead of having your smartphones always in your pocket or always within your arm’s reach; why don’t you have two or three sets of these transparent shirts instead? Just imagine, you won’t really need to worry about misplacing your precious gadget anymore!

This is exactly the idea that Under Armour used as a basis for their technological breakthrough of producing touchscreen shirts for public use.

Touchscreen shirts
Would you consider wearing touchscreen shirts in the future?

Simply speaking, Under Armour visualized a clothing system, which has the ability to be integrated with touchscreen capabilities; in order to give birth to another product line that combines functionality and convenience all at the same time. Suffice it to say, this vision is slowly working its way up to being a fully tangible product because Under Armour has been working and making progress on touchscreen shirts for quite a while now.

Are touchscreen shirts part of Under Armour’s vision?

Indeed! It can be noted that Under Armour recently disclosed Armour39, the most current brand of “wearable technology”, just earlier this week. They wanted to make Armour39 a monitoring system of an athlete’s performance by focusing on WILLpower. With regards to this initiative, touchscreen shirts will be the main tool of measurement.

As stated on the official product page for Armour39:
<blockquoteArmour39™ is the first-of-its-kind performance monitoring system for athletes. Armour39™ tracks heart rate, calories burned, real-time intensity, and WILLpower™.

How will touchscreen shirts measure an athlete’s performance?

It will be a three-step process:

1. You need to plug the module into a chest strap. The module will contain your basic bio-metric information and sync all bio-metric information with either an app or a watch. Obviously, as for the chest strap, this will be part of your touchscreen shirts’ functions, so it will always be kept put, dry and out of the way.

2. For the app, as of right now, you would need to make use of an iOS app for iPhones in order to help you access the data, like your vital signs and WILLpower™.

3. As for the watch, you would need to purchase it as it is sold separately. Just like in the app, you will also be given easy access to your bio-metric data.

However, these touchscreen shirts have one major flaw – it does not contain any GPS functionality, so you will not be able to track your run properly. As a result, the company’s target market which is predominantly composed of runners may be turned off.

On the other hand, though, these touchscreen shirts can be activated for nearly a year while using the battery on the watch. Although, of course, using batteries instead of a rechargeable function, may be another strike on the product’s benefit list.

The system is set to release for retail on March 20th. You would need to shell out $150 for the strap, monitor and bundle.

Is technology such as this reliable? Or are you better off working out the traditional way instead?

Lianne is a pro blogger, advocacy writer, freelance copywriter, entrepreneur, registered nurse & certified geek. She is a Staff Reporter at Geek Insider. She regularly writes at thewiseliving.com and drinks tea a lot.