Smart textiles have attracted growing attention in wearable sports monitoring due to their flexibility, comfort, and sensing capability. This study designs and evaluates a smart textile system for physiological and motion-related monitoring in sports scenarios. The proposed system integrates conductive yarn-based sensing elements, a signal acquisition unit, and a wireless transmission module into an elastic textile platform. Its sensing mechanism is based on resistance variation caused by fabric deformation during body movement and physiological activity. Controlled experiments were conducted with 15 participants under resting, moderate-intensity, and high-intensity conditions. A commercial wearable device was used as the reference system to compare pulse-related trend estimates indirectly derived from textile resistance signals, rather than direct heart-rate measurement. The acquired signals were processed using low-pass filtering and smoothing, and system performance was evaluated using MAE, RMSE, standard deviation, and the coefficient of determination (𝑅2 ). The results showed that the indirectly estimated pulse-related trends had MAE values of 1.4, 2.1, and 3.5 BPM under the three activity levels when compared with the reference device, with an overall 𝑅2 of 0.94. The system also captured respiratory-related variations and motion-response characteristics. These findings indicate that the proposed smart textile system has practical potential for wearable sports monitoring by providing cardiac-related trend information under controlled conditions, although it does not directly measure heart rate using ECG- or PPG-based methods.

smart textiles, wearable sensing, sports monitoring, health-related monitoring, conductive yarn, physiological signal acquisition