Cayre Connected Apparel

Bringing Wearable Tech to Everyday Life

INDUSTRY: Electronics

SERVICES: Brand, Design, UX/UI, Engineering, Prototyping, Soft Goods

Wearables are a rapidly growing product category across industries such as healthcare, sporting goods, and consumer products. Over the years, clients have turned to us for solutions to common wearable design challenges, including launderability, seamless integration of soft electrodes with textiles, and ensuring both comfort and discretion. The Cayre wearable project provided an opportunity for our team to develop a roadmap for embedding sensors into everyday textile products, allowing users to comfortably track their physical data through a connected heart rate monitoring system.

The Challenge

Improve Sensor and Textile Integration

Traditional cut-and-sew construction produces bulky seams that can cause discomfort and limit wear time. It also requires extensive manual labor, increases fabric waste, and raises the risk of quality issues. The challenge was to find a complimentary manufacturing method that enhances comfort of the sensor technology, reduces material waste, and streamlines production without compromising functionality.

The Solution

Integrate Fashion and Digital Health

The Cayre garment seamlessly integrates a dry electrode heart rate monitor using digital knit construction, conductive yarns, recycled materials, and sew-free technology. This innovative approach enables heart rate tracking while ensuring comfort, launderability through removable sensors, and sustainable manufacturing practices.

The Outcome

Enhanced User Experience

The Cayre bra’s soft knit electrodes enhance user experience by providing a more comfortable alternative to hard sensors, increasing wear time and compliance. Its sustainable, highly manufacturable design leverages digital knitting technology, ensuring repeatability with minimal waste.

Why Cayre?

The Cayre sports bra is designed to bridge the gap between mental and physical health, encouraging a more holistic approach to well-being. By seamlessly integrating monitoring technology into daily wear, it helps users stay connected to their overall health throughout their everyday activities.

The sports bra is connected to a phone app that silently collects data in the background, gently nudging the user to be aware of their mental and physical state and encouraging small adjustments toward their health goals. The Cayre brand is about taking care of yourself, your whole self; from moving your body, to meditation, to making sure your body gets the rest it needs.

A Seamless Approach to Innovation

With Priority Designs’ diverse expertise under one roof, we brought together our industrial designers, prototypers, electrical engineers, UX/UI experts, brand strategists, and soft goods specialists to collaborate on this innovative garment.

Our soft goods team utilized advanced tools such as Stoll CreatePlus and Accumark to develop precise, graded apparel patterns. These patterns allowed us to create iterative 3D knit prototypes, tailored for an optimal fit while ensuring maximum comfort and functionality.

Working closely with our electrical engineers, our team produced conductive electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors that are connected via bluetooth to a monitoring device that can be easily manufactured. Material and yarn selection played a crucial role, as we carefully evaluated conductivity, yarn thickness, elasticity, and stretch zones to achieve the perfect balance of performance, durability, and user comfort. This collaborative, detail-driven approach allowed us to develop a wearable that seamlessly meets both functional and aesthetic needs.

Our teams leveraged their expertise in merging hard and soft goods and prototyped samples in-house, allowing us to quickly work through multiple iterations to refine the fit and adjust for usability. The result? A sensing bra that looks, feels, and moves like a traditional sports bra, delivering cutting-edge functionality without compromising comfort or style.

Through the collaboration of our brand, UI, knitting, and electrical engineering teams, we developed a phone application as the digital interface for the sensing bra. The app’s visual brand language goes beyond displaying raw heart rate data, it incorporates UI cues, using color and design, to intuitively indicate when the wearer is in a ‘calm’ or ‘active’ state.

How can we 'Cayre' for you?

With the Cayre system, we’ve developed a process for integrating soft, flexible monitoring sensors into wearable garments, applicable to healthcare, fitness, and commercial industries. Our team tackles common challenges in wearable tech development, including comfort, flexibility, connectivity, and manufacturability.

Interested in integrating smart sensors into your product? Contact us to discuss how we can help with your next project!

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