Episode 135: The Future of Clothing Is So Smart

John Toribio is a doctoral student at UConn in polymer chemistry – and is the first student to join us in this current format of the UConn 360 podcast. In addition to his studies, he is the CEO and CTO of Zemi Labs, (zemilabs.com), which is a start-up company creating smart clothing for comprehensive health and fitness. The company creates wearable garments that provide real-time relevant analytics about human bio-mechanical data, like heart and muscle performance, cognitive awareness, emotional status, and physiological workload. Zemi was the winner of UConn’s 2024 Innovation Quest entrepreneurship competition and received a $15,000 award. Toribio discusses where Zemi is now and what the future might hold. In addition, he talks about how he uses smart clothing and technology in his own life, how he balances his academic and entrepreneurship efforts, and what his own workout regime is like.

Listen to Episode 135 at Podbeam

Mike: Hello everybody. Welcome to the UConn 360 Podcast, another edition. It’s Mike Enright from University Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Izzy, this is an exciting day.

Izzy: Is it because it’s April?

Mike: Well, I guess part of it’s because of April, but since we started doing the podcast, I think this is the first time we’ve had a student on.

Izzy: Oh yeah. I think it is too.

Mike: We’ve had coaches, we’ve had professors, we’ve had researchers, we’ve had administrators. And somehow, it’s taken us this long to get a student on, which is crazy because this place is full of students.

Izzy: Who knew things would get so crazy in April.

Mike: Well, here we are. So, we are very happy to have John Toribio, who is a PhD student here at UConn in polymer chemistry. And I don’t know exactly what that means, but he’s going to tell us. And he’s also the CEO and CTO of Zemi, which is a smart clothing company for comprehensive health and fitness, which I don’t know about. I’m a sneakers and gym shorts guy.

Izzy: Well, it’s time to widen your horizons, because cool things are on the come up, Mike.

Mike: Well, John’s already piped in giving us more knowledge than we already had, so we’re going to bring him right in. But his company last year received an Innovation Quest entrepreneurship award. They were in the competition, and they won that competition, received a $15,000 award. He’s going to tell us what they used that money for. The company creates wearable garments that provide real-time, relevant analytics about human biomechanical data, like heart and muscle performance, cognitive awareness, emotional status, and psychological workload. We’re happy to have John here with us today on the 360 Podcast.

John, you grew up in the Bronx. You went to Iona College for your undergrad work, and now you’re here at UConn as a PhD student. Happy to have you here at UConn. Happy to have you here on the podcast. But tell us a little bit about yourself and your background before coming to UConn.

John: Yeah, thank you. I mean it, I’m very happy to be here, so thank you for having me. First of all, I didn’t know I’m the first student to have, so that’s an extra honor.

Mike: Well, you’re the first student since we took it over. Yeah, the first edition of the podcast might have had some students on it.

John: Word. That’s really cool. But yeah, I mean, you kind of summed it up a little bit. So, I was born and raised in the Bronx to a Dominican family. So, immigrant family. I’m first gen in terms of US citizenship, in terms of college degree, science, entrepreneurship. So, it’s, it’s a lot of firsts. But yeah, I mean, before coming to UConn — so, let me backtrack a little bit. Born and raised in the Bronx, did my first half of high school there. Then for the second half of high school, moved to Wappingers Falls where I finished. Then I went to Iona College for undergrad, where I started off majoring in chemistry and then I picked up a second major in physics.

And then did a little bit of research there, sort of synthesizing or trying to make shorter processes to making drugs or specific types of drugs. And then when I came here, I joined Greg Sotzing’s group in the chemistry program here, where I also do research on sustainable polymers for wearable electronics and essentially making systems that are modular, that we can tune with good precision to have unique properties from them.

Izzy: When I was at the Innovate Health Pitch Fest, I was so interested by your presentation. Like, I was supposed to be filming, and I was totally locked into what you were saying. I thought it was super cool. So, for some of us, like Mike, who are used to wearing old sneakers and gym shorts — what is smart clothing? What’s the purpose of it? What is the future of smart clothing?

John: So, smart clothing is actually a pretty broad term. And we wanted to use that term specifically to show the different directions we can go with this. But generally speaking, you can embed clothing with different sensors and using different types of electrically conductive materials. And you could do different unique things.

Some people have made essentially touch pads on their jackets — certain companies have done that. What we want to do is embed health sensors. So, we want to print electrodes, and what we’re doing is printing electrodes to monitor heart activity, muscle activity, skin activity, using the same types of techniques you would get in a clinical setting or in a hospital so that we get truly medically relevant data.

So, our goal with that, right, is to kind of take all these different signals and be able to paint a comprehensive picture of a person’s state at any point in time. If you have a chest pain, for example, by the time you do get that doctor’s appointment two or three weeks later, that chest pain’s no longer there. And they can’t scan your heart at that time and say what happened two or three weeks ago — not usually, not all the time. So, we want to be able to capture things like that in the moment and find other hidden signals that we wouldn’t be able to find without looking at all the things at once, essentially.

Mike: So, this isn’t clothing you’re necessarily always working out in — this is everyday clothing to pick up on heart signals and chest pains and whatnot?

John: That is the goal long term. I think initially we’ll be starting with athletes, people who are working out, and we’ll use it during their workouts, during their training to optimize their performance. But eventually, we do want to go toward this being an everyday thing and something that can kind of catch things that are life-threatening when they happen.

Mike: I’m wearing this dress shirt. So, could someday a dress shirt — like a regular dress shirt like this — have smart applications in it?

John: So, yes. But for the health monitoring, what we need is kind of like your base layer. So, it’d be like a compression shirt that you wear underneath your dress shirt. But the dress shirt itself could have other features. It could have some LEDs or lights — flexible LEDs, hopefully — that can indicate the response that your body’s having, that the base layer’s picking up on, for example. Or it can have like a touch pad where you can tap it and cause some unique action to happen, whatever you program it to.

Izzy: Yeah. I wear — I’m fiddling with it — I wear an Oura ring every day. And it’s so interesting because it can literally tell me before I’m getting sick. It’ll say like, oh, you have major signs of distress. And then lo and behold, I check my temperature, and I have a fever. I literally did it in one of our meetings. I was like, oh my gosh, it says I have a fever. And everyone’s laughing at me. I was like, no, like — yeah, I’m serious. And it’s funny now, but it’ll be something that is not so abnormal anymore.

John: Yeah. It’ll be a routine.

Izzy: Yeah. No, it will be.

John: That’s awesome. Yeah. The Oura especially is really cool for tracking sleep. And then we want to look at other things beyond sleep as well, more directly on your muscles and more spread out throughout the body.

Izzy: Well, I got seven hours and 42 minutes last night according to this thing. We’re feeling great today. I hope you are too. So, how did you start Zemi, and who else is working on this?

John: The original sort of motivation for doing something like this is my experience with my mom. My mom has fibromyalgia — with that comes chronic, widespread pain. And I always saw how she would go to different physical therapists and, you know, in the moment they could tell her things about the way her muscles are reacting and how she can sort of relieve the pain locally. But it wasn’t something that you could do easily on your own.

And also, just seeing her response to different medications — it was very subjective. And, you know, to get the feedback it’d be like, okay, come back two weeks later, let me know how you felt. And so, I was always interested in saying, okay, what can we do to make some type of technology that can help make this process a lot more transparent?

And so, when I met my advisor, Greg Sotzing, he told me about some of the tech that he had been working on in the lab. And it was just amazing what they were able to do so far. And I was like, okay, there’s a lot of potential to move this forward toward this direction.

Then I took a course — I think fall 2022 if I remember correctly — where I met a few other students, including my co-founder, Kyle Mahoney. And they kind of helped me in the course. Basically, this was led by Lela Mandi and Sam — I can’t remember his last name — but essentially, as a team, we put together an initial business plan for whatever the product would be, or the company would be. Kyle pointed out this would be great for athletes as well. He’s a PhD student in kinesiology, so very well versed in performance science, exercise science, and just all the science that goes on behind sports and making these elite athletes. And he was just telling me, this could be really good for athletics as well if we tailor it toward that. There’s a lot to learn there and a really good market to capture there too. And I think it’s the best place to start for really understanding the limits to which we could push this technology

John: So yeah, it’s kind of been that, and then I did a few programs, a couple courses. We participated in Innovation Quest, which of course was very critical to where we are now and getting the resources that we needed to kind of keep things moving along.

Mike: So, I was going to ask you about Innovation Quest. Talk about what that competition was like, and how did it feel to be the winner, and what did you do with the funding that you received by winning the championship of it?

John: Yeah. It’s a very surreal experience. I remember walking into the room to present the pitch, and there were a lot more people than I expected. So, I was definitely very, very nervous at first. I think getting the first words out was pretty tricky. But once I started pitching it, it kind of went smoothly.

I think preparing for the pitch was a process in itself. Really had to think about: Who are we creating value for? How many people are actually interested in something like this? And, you know, can we talk to these people beforehand and kind of validate our own hypotheses? Which was a pretty intense process. And of course, the economics have to work out. So, you know, can this technology actually scale? What even gives us the advantage over other people? We’re not the first people to have this idea, right. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that. But I think we have a really unique way to approach it from the technical standpoint and from the fact that we are scientists, and we want to see the science that will come from this technology as well.

And so, especially getting this award — it was a very happy moment. I remember getting the email and just immediately texting Kyle and being like, “Hey dude, we got this.” And I mean, those $15,000 were huge. I mean, the fact that it was a check that was directly given to us, it went directly to our bank account — no real strings attached or anything like that. We could use it very flexibly.

We’ve used it to buy equipment, buy materials, but also just setting up a website and paying legal fees, like to register the company. All these things that you don’t know necessarily upfront are going to cost money. And every step along the way costs money. But just having that money to do it in the first place is really critical. And it’s not just the money — we’ve also gotten a lot of mentorship from the incubator that we did immediately afterward as well.

Izzy: It was so cool to hear all of the different pitches when I was there, but something in particular that stuck out about yours to me is that you were one of the few that brought a prototype — you got to pass around one of the shirts. So, I thought that was really cool. Again, I was standing there filming, I was like, “Wait, I want to see this.”

So going back to looking to where the future takes us with smart clothing — do you think this will be accessible for, again, Mike, sorry I keep using you as an example — for someone that maybe isn’t a whiz with technology or hasn’t used something like an Apple Watch or an Oura Ring or something like that before, will it be easy to use for everyone? Will there be an app to look at these results? Kind of walk us through how that would work.

John: Definitely. It has to be, right? So, the early versions that we’re at now, of course, need some sort of fiddling just to make sure we’re not having too much noise interference and things like that. And we will be optimizing these things — that’s kind of the next stage that we’re at now.

But we need to get it to a point where anyone can just throw it on and use it to monitor their health. Everyone’s health is super important, and we want to make sure that we’re making something that anyone can use, because the whole goal of it is to allow healthcare and medicine to work for you as an individual — and that means everyone.

So, we do want to get it to a point where it’s as easy as you just throw it on in the morning, you attach the transmitter device to it, it snaps on, and it starts recording. And on your smartphone, you should be able to see any alerts. Of course, anything that is concerning should pop up and warn you. Anything that you just want to see — like the same way as you see for the Oura Ring or the Whoop app or the Apple Health app — you can just see the day as a recap, the week as a recap.

Be able to share that instantly with a trainer, a coach, or even just your significant other, your parents, or see your parents’ data if you’re concerned about them. And then eventually, as we work out things through healthcare, with your medical provider as well — and hopefully just streamline the whole process.

Mike: Like everything else with technology, how do people protect their privacy if they’re wearing a piece of smart clothing?

John: Yeah. So that’s going to be a huge component to scaling this up. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I have all the answers yet — because I don’t. I will find people that have all the answers. There are people who are experts in studying this exact thing. There are people who are privacy policy experts, there are people who are experts in developing the technology to create that privacy, and we definitely need to find these people.

But I think because we have the vision to align it with healthcare practices down the line, we are trying to take that strict approach from the beginning and make sure that we are as close as possible — if not fully — HIPAA compliant from the beginning. And that’s the goal as of right now.

Izzy: So, just out of curiosity, what do you personally do for exercise? And do you use any sort of smart clothing or any sort of exercise monitoring technology that may be already existent?

John: So, I use — I mean, I have an Apple Watch, and so I use that definitely whenever I’m working out. I like lifting sometimes, but I think more of what I enjoy is playing sports. Lately, I haven’t made time for it — I’ve been super busy — but I do like playing volleyball with some friends sometimes. My girlfriend introduced me to volleyball — it’s super fun. And basketball — I played a bit growing up, and it’s just something that I try to keep up with. I’m not very tall, so my spot on the court is just in the back shooting. I’m not really good in the paint.

I used to play baseball a lot when I was younger, but it’s hard finding enough people to play and a nice field to play on sometimes. But yeah, like I mentioned, I use an Apple Watch usually whenever I’m playing any of those things. Once our prototypes are a bit more refined, I’ll be wearing those as soon as I can — as soon as I can bring them out of the lab and have them not break on me.

But yeah, I know there’s a lot of other really cool technologies out there. I just haven’t tried too many of them. Kyle has for sure tried a bunch of them, and so whenever I have a question about, “Okay, how did this company do this?” I’ll just ask him, and he usually has an answer, or he knows where to find the answer. So, it’s really good.

Mike: I noticed you’re wearing a Zemi t-shirt right now.

John: I am.

Mike: Is that a smart shirt or just a good old regular fashion t-shirt?

John: No, so we had a lot of friends and family that wanted to help us out somehow, and I can’t just take investment from everyone — I’m pretty sure there’s laws against that. So, what we did instead was say, okay, we have all the screen-printing equipment — because that’s actually how we make our smart shirts — we screen-print a conductive ink on there. And so, we were like, wait, we can just get regular shirts, make up our own designs, print them ourselves, and we can sell them essentially as merch and kind of raise money that way.

And so, this is actually from the first batch of it. We have our logo on the front, our mission statement. On the back, there’s another cool design with a couple of our mantras and some other cool designs. And we actually just set up our website to take orders for this. We did a small run back in October just within our own circle, but we’ve gotten a lot of questions about it and a lot of people really interested. So, we actually set up our website just to take some orders and send them out.

We have different colors — this one’s gray. We’ve got a green one, black, and a light pale blue.

Mike: What’s the website?

John: zemilabs.com

Mike: As Zemi progresses, are you looking for potential investors? Would you ever go public with this? I know those are all big steps down the road, but what’s the plan?

John: I know a lot of people talk about exit strategies, and I’ve had to convince myself that that is a very broad term. I don’t want to exit necessarily. I see this as a lifelong project. I’m definitely dedicated to this. I don’t want to just build it up and sell it off. I think the potential to help people is immense, and I want to make sure I’m there for every step of the way.

But definitely, we are applying for different grants. Being a scientific startup and a tech-based startup, there are a lot of non-dilutive grants we can go for with NSF, hopefully NIH, DOD, and way beyond that. But we are eventually going to have to take on investment. We are kind of setting up the terms right now for what that would look like, so I can’t tell you specific terms or anything. But if there are investors interested — definitely reach out.

Mike: No forward-looking statements. That’s what they say in the investment world — no forward-looking statements.

Izzy: Good to know. Good to know. So, I know you kind of just briefly touched upon it in the last question, but what’s the future of Zemi? The sky’s the limit. How far do you think this is going to take you? What do you think this might look like in five, ten years?

John: Yeah, so five, ten years — hopefully we are something you can just go online, buy, and have at least a bit of peace of mind that you can track these important vitals all the time and that they are highly accurate. Again, we’re using electrical signals that are the exact same as what you’d get in a hospital clinical setting, and can use it during your workouts, during sports.

For me to tell you that in five or ten years we’ll have figured out exactly how to get all the doctors and all the medical practitioners to trust this and love it and use it might be a bit ambitious. I know there’s a lot of skepticism that medical practitioners have — for very good reason — when it comes to wearable tech and using it heavily for health. But we hope to be breaking down those walls and showing through research, experience, and happy users that this works, that it is reliable, and can tell us a lot more about ourselves than what we can just feel on our own.

Beyond health, our technology is super versatile. Like I mentioned, we’re printing conductive ink on fabric. We can make it very, very conductive and we can do a lot of cool things with this, especially combining it with other technologies. So, we hope to be a leader overall in the wearable tech space. We can work with other companies too, that have their own visions and ideas, and we’d be happy to help bring them to life with our tech.

Mike: So, when do you finish up your academic work? Because as you’re doing this whole company, you’re also getting a PhD. So, it’s a pretty aggressive schedule.

Izzy: You’re not busy at all?

John: Yeah, no.

Mike: When do you finish up your doctorate?

John: So, I’m looking to defend this summer — probably like June or July. So, I’ll be walking in May, and by then I’ll just essentially be finishing up my thesis, preparing my defense, and be on my way. So, I gotta get funding for the company pretty soon obviously so I can pay myself, and Kyle can have a salary as well, and so we can get going. We want to bring on more people as well. There’s definitely a lot of moving parts to it.

So, like you mentioned, being a PhD student in itself is a lot. And then doing the startup — I’m just privileged to have kind of a good support system all around. My advisor has been fully supporting it since day one — day zero, really. My friends, obviously my co-founder, and everyone’s just super supportive. So, it definitely helps. But it’s a lot of work. You got to be really thinking about one project or another 24/7.

Izzy: Will Zemi be your primary focus after graduating, or do you see yourself getting an additional job while working on Zemi?

John: It will always be my top priority, whether I have another job or not. So, I think it all comes down to what funding looks like. Obviously, I have to make a living, but yeah — I think we are lined up well to get a good amount of funding. As of right now, it looks like it’s going to be just my only thing.

Mike: Well, John, you’re off to a great start. We’re real proud of you here at UConn, and we’re glad you came to the podcast today.

Izzy: Yeah, thank you.

Mike: And tell our listeners one more time the website, in case they want to check it out, support you, and see what’s going on.

John: Yeah, so it’s www.zemilabs.com — Z-E-M-I-L-A-B-S dot com.

Mike: Great.

John: Thank you.

Mike: Great. John, thanks for joining us today. Izzy, this was a good one.

Izzy: Yeah, it was. Thanks for being our first student.

John: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Mike: And we’ll talk to everybody next time on the UConn 360 Podcast.