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Staying healthy by dressing smart (view
website)
 Patients in the near future will use 'smart' fabrics to keep
them healthy, thanks to a EU project that recently completed
initial development of high tech clothing.
The Wearable Health
Care System (WEALTHY) IST project just completed 30 months
of research and development to prototype
technologies at the heart of smart fabrics. Smart fabrics
incorporate functional fibres and yarns into the weave,
allowing researchers to develop many useful sensors for
a wide variety
of applications.
Intelligent use of microelectronics allows scientists
and engineers to extract useful data from very simple inputs.
For example, the WEALTHY project integrated temperature
sensors in the armpit and shoulder of their garment to
register core and skin temperature.
Europe is currently a leader in R&D on smart fabrics
and interactive textiles, a market that analyst firm Venture
Development Corporation believes will boom in the coming
years: at $300m in 2003 the overall market growth is estimated
between 11 per cent and 28 per cent through 2008 ($720
m in 2008).
Towards commercialisation
In the coming months the WEALTHY project will send prototypes
of its smart clothing to selected stores around Europe,
in part to acquire vital data from users.
"It's a validation process," says Dr Rita Paradiso,
research director of Italian R&D company Smartex and
coordinator of the WEALTHY project. "We have working
prototypes and we want to get feedback from potential users."
"I think it will be about three years before full
commercialisation is possible," says Paradiso. "We
are currently working on another project, MyHeart with
Philips, that should develop a commercial product for heart
monitoring in the next three years."
Once a product is available, there will be plenty of applications.
The clothing can monitor vital health data, communicate
with remote health centres and present data in a variety
of formats for further analysis by doctors and researchers.
Many potential users
So who will benefit from such clever clothes? Soldiers
under extreme conditions in the field, athletes, personnel
in high-risk jobs like firefighting, or the sick and
vulnerable, will all benefit from the health data these
clothes can provide.
Doctors will be able to remotely monitor a patient's health
statistics and condition, useful for observing at risk
populations, such as the elderly or people with cardio-vascular
disease, for example. Monitoring the health of newborn
babies is another promising application.
Athletes’ performance and vital data can be captured
during exercise or competitions. This information can keep
athletes safe, and also help them to improve performance.
The system can also be used as part of treatment, for
example monitoring people undergoing physical therapy and
rehabilitation. Sleep apneas, where people stop breathing
in their sleep, is another application, or for people who
drive long distances.
"Really there are a vast number of applications,
though the garment would need to be customised for each
task," says Paradiso.
Simple properties, advanced tasks
All these applications come from using the simple electrical
properties of electrodes and other simple circuits to
mine rich data seams. Rather than overloading the clothes
with weighty gadgets, WEALTHY employed the ingenuity
of engineers and scientists to allow lightweight devices
do the heavy lifting.
 For example, in the WEALTHY system
one prototype respiration-sensing device uses impedance
to derive the respiration of the
wearer. The device uses four electrodes placed on a
thoracic position. The two external are injecting high
frequency
current (50 KHz) and the other ones are capturing the
voltage variation caused by thoracic impedance change.
The output signal is modulated by changes in the body
impedance accompanying the respiratory cycle.
WEALTHY's prototype contains tiny sensors that can collect
information about the wearer's respiration, core and surface
skin temperature, position (standing or lying down) and
movement. What's more, the garment can take advantage of
Europe's extensive mobile phone network to communicate
the data with remote sensors, thanks to the integration
of a miniaturised GPRS transmitter.
This transmitter could, in a future version, use emerging
location-based services (LBS) to transmit the exact location
of the wearer to emergency services or rescue teams, meaning
a faster response to accidents and a better chance of survival
for the victim.
"There were some major challenges," says Paradiso. "In
the beginning I was really worried that all the different
electrodes and sensors would interfere with each other
and create noise, interfering with the sensors' signals,
but we over came that problem. Now we need to deal with
noise created by movement."
The WEALTHY consortium includes some of Europe's leading
companies in fabric manufacturing, software development,
healthcare science and sensor research, like Milior, a
major international manufacturer of advanced fabrics.
"We have a broad range of expertise from our partners
and they provide invaluable input and experience when we
encounter a problem. For example, when we hit a snag on
fabric design I could go to the R&D department of Milior
to get help solving the problem," says Paradiso.
The advantage of the WEALTHY prototype is the wide range
of data it can capture, it's ability to transmit this information
to remote monitoring centres, and it's comfort. "It
has to be comfortable, like underwear really, if people
are going to use it," says Paradiso.
Further developments for the suit are in planning, such
as an acoustic wave sensor, which could be used to measure
the wearer's pulse, for example.
In future, clothes will have all the more reason to be
smart.
Contact:
Rita Paradiso
Via Pistoiese,755 D
I-59100 Prato
Italy
Tel: +39-050-754350
Source: Based on information from WEALTHY
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