Women Health Products Shopping Guide

The bra, made by Textronics Inc. with components from Polar Electro Inc., is easy to use — just snap a transmitter into a pocket located in the band of the bra, activate a digital watch with a heart-monitor setting, and start sweating as it advised you to monitor our heart rates so we get the most out of our workouts without overdoing it. But I haven’t ever felt like strapping on extraneous hardware to keep tabs on my pulse.

The $75 Numetrex sports bra and transmitter works similarly to those plastic strap-on heart monitors, but the benefit of the bra is comfort — no plastic touches your skin, it feels like any other sports bra, and you don’t have to worry about the transmitter shifting, chafing or loosening.
The electrode sensors are knitted into a few inches of fabric in the band. These sensors pick up the heart’s electrical signal, which is sent to the transmitter snapped into the band.
The transmitter, about the size of a matchbook and hidden in the bra’s seam, communicates with a watch or the display on a treadmill.

I don’t have many complaints about the Numetrex bra — for the most part, it was great. However, out of the dozen or so times I ran with it, the bra worked spottily on two occasions — once when it was right out of the box and once after its first visit to the laundromat.

The transmitter sometimes lost the signal, apparently because the band wasn’t staying sweaty enough. But after the second trip through the washer and dryer, I avoided the problem by making sure I wet the band thoroughly before using.
Interestingly, whenever I rinsed the bra out and hung it up to dry, I had no sweat-activation problems the next day.

Review by MADLEN READ at Yahoo! News