Smart shirts embedded with optic fibers can monitor wearer's condition and transmit data wirelessly.

Long a dream of geeks and science fiction writers, the smart shirt -- a wearable computer -- will hit store shelves next year. Far from a novelty, the list of people with a practical reason to get one is much longer than you might think.

Funded by a grant from the US Navy -- which was looking for a garment to wirelessly report when its wearer had been wounded -- Georgia Tech has developed a smart shirt prototype.

The shirt evolved from a rough-hewn military vest to a shirt with plastic-polymer optical fibers woven in as data buses. That makes the shirt into what its designers call a "wearable motherboard."

The garment comes with data disks, which are used as plug-in sensors to monitor the wearer's vital signs.

The developers foresee the shirt being used by soldiers, athletes, astronauts, airline pilots and anyone whose vital statistics are of critical importance. The data points connect to a proprietary wireless transmitter, which will be as small as a pager.

In the near term, analysts said the shirts could make life more comfortable for heart patients by allowing them to be constantly monitored outside of the hospital.

"The system wirelessly transmits the information to the hospital, so I, as a patient, feel very comfortable, and it is going to aid my recovery," said Sundaresan Jayaraman of Georgia Tech's school of Textile and Fiber Engineering

The transmitters will use the 802.11b wireless protocol to communicate with base stations up to 300 feet away or tap directly into the military's own wireless network. After the network uplinks the data to satellites, distant doctors will be able to field the data and prescribe treatments remotely.

The transmitters will also be Bluetooth-enabled, for much shorter-range networking. This will allow the shirt to beam data to nearby PDAs, notebooks, and other portable wireless devices.

But the biggest demand might be for the smallest shirt of all: an infant-sized version, designed to guard against sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

"If the baby would lapse into what we call apnea [a temporary cessation of breathing], then the shirt would alert the caregiver that something is wrong with the baby," Jayaraman said.

New York-based Sensatex has purchased the rights to make and sell the smart shirts, and said it is aiming for a launch in the third quarter of 2002. The shirt will cost around $35 to $65.

The Sensatex smart shirt will initially be marketed to people interested in sports and fitness, as well as to military and public safety personnel.