Qus- Smart Sportswear

Are you a gym owner, sports team captain, fitness trainer, a specialist in physical therapy, gym rat, a personal trainer, or a professional athlete? Or do you just take care of your body and want to live healthy?

Imagine running or exercising without a chest strap, an arm strap, or your cell phone clumsy attached to your body. Try it in QUS smart clothes, it’s like having your own personal trainer with you, every step, every mile, and every push-up you do. A healthy lifestyle and regular exercising isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of living. Live, exercise and do sports smart with QUS.

QUS is the world´s first washable smart textile that supports accurate body data acquisition. Intelligent sensors in the QUS shirt record all relevant data, store it on a cloud, and help you optimize your training. Also, it can endure up to one hundred washing cycles.

With QUS, you can track your pulse, heart rate, breathing rate, and calorie consumption. All of that, including geodata, acceleration, G-force, sleep monitoring, and regeneration analysis is recorded via the onboard unit. The data collection is encrypted using an integrated communication chip and automatically transferred to the QUS cloud.

We had the task of completing the product design of an onboard electronic device that gets attached to the shirt. This included the development of electronics, embedded software, and enclosure. In the end, the device was certified for FCC/CE and prepared for mass production.

The challenge was to implement a lot of functionality in a small device measuring just 60x40x10 millimeters. Moreover, the device also needed to be IP67 rated for ingress protection. As a result of the small size, the height of components on the PCB was limited to 1 mm. Therefore, a custom Bluetooth 4.0 radio was implemented resulting in a very thin design and also saving a lot in BOM cost. Similarly, the GNSS functionality was added by using a GNSS chipset versus using an off-the-shelf module. Furthermore, a custom shield for the GNSS was developed. In the end, both radio antennas were impedance matched and show excellent RF performance considering they operate in the proximity of the human body.

The QUS smart shirt was first presented to the public at the 2018 CES in Las Vegas. We managed to deliver on time despite tight deadlines for the show. SanSirro was later awarded the 2018 German Innovation Award and the same year got the Red Dot Design Award.