Why strap on a watch to track your next workout when smart clothing can collect just as much information about your activity and vitals? It's not a rhetorical question, and the answer, for now anyway, is reliability. OMsignal is among a very small group of early players in the market of smart clothing with a line of shirts ($249 for the Up & Running starter kit) that measure heart rate, respiration rate, steps, calories burned, and overall effort during a workout. The shirt and Little Black Box that snaps onto it collect information about your activities and send them wirelessly to a mobile app, where you can track your progress over time, gauge your fitness level, and perhaps push yourself harder.

Unfortunately, the OMsignal shirt and connected sensor haven't lived up to my expectations so far. I'm a firm believer that wearable tech should be more interesting than watches. I want to see clothing succeed, but it's tough to get smart clothes right. Fit matters tremendously. So does comfort and style. And reliability. OMsignal's shirts don't nail it in any of those areas, and had I spent $250 on this product, I'd be disappointed. Moreover, the company only offers shirts for men at this point in time, with a vague "sometime this year" release date for a women's line. So it's tough nuts for half the potential market. To put the shirt through its paces, I enlisted the help of a man-tester. We walked through the initial setup together so that we could have the same experience, and then he wore the shirt both in my presence and alone at the gym to get ample additional experience with it. I wanted to know if he found the app intuitive, whether the clothes were comfortable, and what his overall impression of the experience was.

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