Smartwear Shirt Tracks Your Athletic Performance

A t-shirt using biometric monitoring technologies has just been made available for purchase, providing a new option of performance-tracking "smartwear" that can compete with products such as Fitbit.

OMsignal, a fresh start-up company set on getting into a growing industry based around athletic monitoring technologies, announced on Thursday that it will be first releasing a line of "Biometric Smeartwear"  for men.

Each of these four shirts have health sensors that can measure a person's physiological data in real-time. This data, which can reflect biometric health and athletic performance, is relayed wirelessly to a smartphone app designed by the company that helps people keep track of their training and health.

The initial four shirts are comprised of an under-shirt, a sleeveless shirt, a casual T-shirt, and a long-sleeved shirt.

Stephane Marceau, the CEO and founder of OMsignal, told Techcruch that his company focused on releasing men's wear first because the technology behind the smartwear is relatively complicated, and they wanted to focus on the base design before figuring out how to tweak it so that it could fit to the wide variety of contours on a woman's body.

The current products start at approximately $200 and include both a shirt and the accompanying software. Additional shirts range from $100 to $140 as they can link up to an already installed app.

According to the company, the accompanying app allows for athletes to track factors such as energy reserves, physical stress levels, and potential for improvement based of biometric readings (heart rate, muscle tension, breathing volume, etc.).

Similar products, such as the well-established Fitbit wristband already exist -- tracking heart rate, activity intensity, and calories burned. However, Fitbit recently has suffered from a severe blow to consumer trust after the new Fitbit Force was recalled in February. Numerous consumers claimed that the electronic wristband was causing severe rashes on the wrist and forearm.

This could be an ideal time for OMsignal to be getting itself in on the fitness tracking market, as a class-action lawsuit was filed against Fitbit just last month. The plaintiffs are claiming that the company did not handle the recall in an adequate manner.

OMsignal announced the release of its first line of products in a press release on May 8.