New Breakthroughs in Health-Monitoring Clothes
Researchers at Université Laval's Faculty of Science and Engineering and its Center for Optics, Photonics, and Lasers have created a smart T-shirt that monitors the wearer's respiratory rate in real time. Stepan Gorgutsa, an optics engineer, had just started migrating the idea of flexible fibers to textiles and was looking for an application for this useful technology. While working at the hospital at Univerité Laval in Quebec City, Canada, Gorgusta met the director of research who informed him that nurses are assigned to monitor newborn babies' respiration and heart rate for the first 24 hours of life. The biggest problem they encountered here was the technology required to do so had to be clipped to the babies, which would cause them to scream and squirm. This sparked an idea in Gorgusta's mind--a sensor that would monitor heart rate and respiratory rate that wouldn't constrict the user, and was nearly invisible.
Gorgusta and his team worked to create a t-shirt that can monitor heart rate and respiration. The design couldn't be too tight, but had to be able to pick up signals from the wearer. The shirt has no wires or electrodes, it rather has a flexible antenna sewn into it at chest level. The antenna is made of a hollow optical fiber coated with a thin layer of silver on its inner surface. The fiber's exterior surface is covered in a polymer that protects it against the environment. "The antenna does double duty, sensing and transmitting the signals created by respiratory movements," says Professor Messaddeq, who also holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Photonic Innovations. "The data can be sent to the user's smartphone or a nearby computer."
As the wearer breathes in, the smart fiber senses the increase in both thorax circumference and the volume of air in the lungs, explains Messaddeq. "These changes modify some of the resonant frequency of the antenna. That's why the T shirt doesn't need to be tight or in direct contact with the wearer's skin. The oscillations that occur with each breath are enough for the fiber to sense the user's respiratory rate." The researchers also coated the fibers with a special water-repelling treatment and tested it by washing it more than 20 times.
The information is collected from the wearer of the garment and is then sent to a tablet, where one nurse can see the vitals of each patient in the room. Ultimately they hope to extend the inventions to rural settings, including a mobile app so a doctor who is not even in the room can monitor patients.
The device is clinical-grade, and its power lasts 5-7 days. Each hat only costs around $75; the company, Neopenda is planning to sell them in packages and include a tablet with each batch. They are launching the product first in Uganda, and they hope to expand to other settings where resources are scarce.
Eventually, clothes like this may help emergency first responders, people in sleep clinics trying to monitor restrictions in sleep and, of course, newborns. Newborns were the main focus of this invention for many researches because, nearly 3 million babies die in their first month of life every year, and 98 percent of these deaths occur in the developing world. This invention, and similar ones that have been developed in to other garments such as hats, can be life saving.
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/mach/health-sensing-clothes-may-save-lives-infants-first-responders-ncna768721
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