Cambridge, Massachusetts - A team at MIT has designed "smart clothes", incorporating tech into everyday outfits to better monitor your health and alert you to changes in your body.

If a watch can already measure your heart rate, and perhaps even your blood sugar, why should wearables stop at your wrist?

A group from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) have designed "smart fabric" composed of high-tech fibers that can sense what a person is doing, and how they are doing it, just by being worn.

So far the team has developed a number of pieces of clothing like socks, gloves, and vests.

They envision their new technology being used for everything from customizing workout programs for an individual athlete, to helping the elderly in rehabilitation programs.

If the idea sounds like wearing bulky pieces of a space-suit, it isn't.

Officially dubbed "tactile electronics," the pieces of clothing are created by blending common textile fibers with specialized ones that track pressure, instead of having to wear a bunch of uncomfortable wired sensors.

A connected app can determine if a person is positioned correctly during an exercise, if they have been sitting too long, or even alert help if an elderly person has fallen.

According to the program's page, the uses could be even more futuristic. Co-author Wan Shou, a postdoc at CSAIL, said of the possibilities, "Imagine robots that are no longer tactilely blind, and that have 'skins' that can provide tactile sensing just like we have as humans."

Apple also recently secured a patent for smart socks that can help connect users to their AR games and electronics.

The eventual aim for researchers is to finally create a product that is easy enough to mass produce.

This could mean that in the near future, your clothes could alert you to changes such as weight gain or loss of muscle tone before you even realize those changes had taken place.