Design and Evaluation of Novel Textile Wearable Systems for the Surveillance of Vital Signals

Abstract

This article addresses the design, development, and evaluation of T-shirt prototypes that embed novel textile sensors for the capture of cardio and respiratory signals. The sensors are connected through textile interconnects to either an embedded custom-designed data acquisition and transmission unit or to snap fastener terminals for connection to external monitoring devices. The performance of the T-shirt prototype is evaluated in terms of signal-to-noise ratio amplitude and signal interference caused by baseline wander and motion artefacts, through laboratory tests with subjects in standing and walking conditions. Performance tests were also conducted in a hospital environment using a T-shirt prototype connected to a commercial three-channel Holter monitoring device. The textile sensors and interconnects were realized with the assistance of an industrial six-needle digital embroidery tool and their resistance to wear addressed with normalized tests of laundering and abrasion. The performance of these wearable systems is discussed, and pathways and methods for their optimization are highlighted.

Towards The Internet of Smart Clothing: A Review on IoT Wearables and Garments for Creating Intelligent Connected E-Textiles

“…For instance, in [189] the authors present an IoT-enabled system to prevent obesity that collects sensor data through a smartphone that acts as gateway. Similar communications architectures are proposed in [190,191]. Specifically, in [190] the authors present a T-shirt to monitor the ECG signals from the wearer through a BLE connection that can be read by a smartphone, which might upload them later to a remote server.…”

“…Similar communications architectures are proposed in [190,191]. Specifically, in [190] the authors present a T-shirt to monitor the ECG signals from the wearer through a BLE connection that can be read by a smartphone, which might upload them later to a remote server. In [191] the same communications architecture is proposed for collecting information from a smart clothing prototype aimed at monitoring the ECG and the respiration of a patient.…”

Integrating Interactive Clothing and Cyber-Physical Systems: A Humanistic Design Perspective

“…Secondly, the development of interactive clothing lacks the guidance of a theoretical system model, and clothing designers engaged in art design do not know how to use sensor technology to achieve the automatic interaction effect of clothing to trigger the communication desire of autistic patients. Current researchers seldom dabble in the systematic research of smart clothing from information modeling to humanistic evaluation, and most of them analyze the information technology application or humanistic design respectively from a single academic background [15][16][17][18][19], which may lead their inability to systematically explain the principle and process of how to extract data as well as transform and form a humanistic feeling of the interactive clothing.…”

Easy-to-Build Textile Pressure Sensor

“…These studies include flexible temperature sensors [ 11 , 18 ], strain gauge sensors [ 15 , 19 , 20 ], electromagnetic induced sensors [ 21 ] and pressure sensors [ 22 ]. Amongst these sensors, pressure sensors have been widely studied because of its multiple applications, such as in the healthcare domain [ 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 ], sports monitoring [ 28 , 29 , 30 ] and eating habits monitoring [ 31 ].…”