It’s early in the market for smart wearables, but, to reach its potential, products need to be easy and mindless to wear.

There have been a host of highly-touted wearables beyond Google Glasses and trackers like Fitband, Jawbone UP, Nike Fuelband, Microsoft Band and others communicate data so that you can track your heart rate, calorie burn, exercise routine and more. Research firm Strategy Analytics expects revenue in the global wearable devices market to reach $37 billion in 2020 from $1 billion last year.

Full disclosure: I love my wearable tracker. And a billion dollar market says that existing smart wearables have got something going. Currently, I’s somewhere in the digital queue for my Apple Sports Watch.

Last summer’s biggest surprise came courtesy of a big brand working with a major event and a small smart garments pioneer. Ball boys at the U.S. Open wore the Polo Tech Shirt, a compression tee that is more than a tee. It’s a spandex shirt embedded with biometric sensors that acts like an extremely sophisticated fitness device.

To get the Tech onto the market, Ralph Lauren Polo partnered with OMSignal, a pioneer in smart clothing, to make the U.S. Open debut even though the shirt is not being sold yet.

Sensors knitted into the shirt include a gyroscope, an accelerator and a heartbeat monitor. All the data is collected by a tracking module and fed into an iOS app that displays stress levels, calories burned, heartbeat, respirations and energy output. Athletes can adjust training by breathing more deeply or increasing exertion to hit target heart rate, aiming to reduce stress in competitive situations and increasing exertion to hit a heart rate target.

Polo has not priced the shirt available next spring but claims that it won’t cost a lot more than its existing line of polos. In addition, it will come in different styles for all their buyers, male and female.

OM has priced its own version of the spandex smart shirt, which includes the tracking module sensor at $199. The company is funded by a host of venture firms including Bessemer Venture Partners as well as Flextronics. The latter is most notable because, as the second largest electronics contract manufacturer, Flextronics has the capacity to massively scale production of sensors if OM’s technology takes off.

The fact that Athos, Hexoskin and others are getting into the smart athletic wear market will presumably expand the functionality, lure new clothing partners and reduce the price of smart garments.

Athos is already pushing advances sales of its smart athletic wear with appealing video of not just runners but serious yoga aficionados. They are making a point of going after more than the male runner.

Polo has the deep pockets to push the technology the furthest. It can partner with the best smart textile companies and tech firms to take fitness clothing to the next level.

I’m sure Polo would like to see tennis champ Rafael Nadal sporting a Tech Shirt at the French Open he wins almost every year, even if it had to dish out a $2M endorsement deal to make it happen.

You have to sell a lot of shirts to recoup that investment, but that doesn’t matter. It’s about early to market. Polo has already grabbed the inside lane as the cool smart garments brand.

It shouldn’t surprise you that Polo expects to see similar technology to the Tech Shirt soon woven into their classic dress shirts as soon as next year.

The possible applications for the smart clothing market are wide-ranging, from the brilliant to the silly to the life-changing.

Imagine giving a sales presentation and having your shirt tell you with a hug of your chest that your heart rate’s too high, and you’re not breathing enough. Inhale deeply! Exhale deeply! Slow down your pitch and make the deal. You might even be able to synch it through the cloud to your presentation so that later you can review on which slide you got nervous and then coach yourself.

What if you could be smoother on that next online date? Smaller chips running on lower battery power are transmitting data not only to your skin but also to other sensors through the cloud. You feel nervous talking to this Beauty? Suddenly your smart socks get cool to chill you out.

Or a woman on a Match.com date wants to get away from Creepy Guy she’s met at Starbucks. She pinches the back of her collar. This activates her cellphone to ring. She can pick up the phone and “talk to Aunt Mabel” who’s having an emergency that requires the woman to leave Starbucks immediately and attend to her aunt. Of course, no one is named Mabel anymore, and the low tone beeping in the woman’s ear is a reminder to just tell the white lie about Mabel so she can skedaddle. If her integrity can live with it, she might be able to escape.

Imagine the more serious applications of smart garments in the Internet of Things.

A cozy pair of Smart Socks on a toddler might provide advance warning of a fever or a sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) or a host of other threats. Smart Bedsheets could monitor a hundred health variables of the hospital patient lying on top of them. These are just figments of my imagination but the possibilities are endless when it comes to smart fabric.

And just so you don’t think the sock idea for health is off, it’s already being done in fitness. Sensoria’s electronic anklet magnetically connects to its high-tech socks. The anklet relays data like speed, distance and stride to a smartphone. It also shows you the pressure on your feet to monitor potential harmful stress.

Apple, Google and Samsung all will soon have health monitoring platforms that link fitness wearables’ data to the cloud where it could be linked to doctors and medical records. Privacy restrictions today aside, someday this will happen and be a great blessing.

Intel and the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced an alliance to create wearables that can monitor and track the symptoms of people with Parkinson’s so that the collected data can be aggregated and analyzed to improve research and treatment. Parkinson’s is the second most widely prevalent disease in the world after Alzheimers.

No wonder dozens of new ventures are being cheered on by physicians to create health wearables. Given the size and the needs of the market here and globally, this has huge potential and should be high priority.

No one has to adopt smart fabric. We wear much the same basic clothing we’ve worn for centuries: shirts, pants, shoes, socks. If a smart device were as unobtrusive as to be woven into fabric of these pieces of clothing, it would be more easily used.

It’s just the opposite of cinching a smart monitor across your chest before you get on the treadmill. The smart clothing wouldn’t be uncomfortable, and it wouldn’t be just about workouts anymore.

The smartest clothing can have all the intelligence in the world built into it, but if it requires a big behavior change, as a lot of tech innovations do here in Silicon Valley, the products won’t sell.

Smart wearables will be adopted most quickly if they are as easy to slip on as a pair of warm socks.