Wearable Medical Devices Using Textile and Flexible Technologies for Ambulatory Monitoring

Abstract

Health smart clothes are in contact with almost all the surface of the skin offer large possibilities for the location of sensors for non invasive measurements. Head band, collar, tee-shirt, socks, shoes, belts for chest, arm, wrist, legs ... provide localization with specific purpose taking into account their proximity of an organ or a source of biosignal, and also its ergonomic possibility (user friendly) to fix a sensor, and the associated instrumentations (batteries, amplifiers, signal processing, telecom, alarm, display ...). Progress in science and technology offers, for the first time, intelligence, speed, miniaturization, sophistication and new materials at low cost. In this new landscape, microtechnologies, information technologies and telecommunications are a key factor. Microsensors : Microtechnologies offer the possibility of small size, but also intelligent, active device, working with low energy, wireless and non invasive or mini invasive. These sensors have to be thin, flexible and compatible with textile, or made using textile technologies, new fibers with specific properties: mechanical, electrical, optical ... The field of applications is very large, e.g. continuous monitoring on elderly population, professional and military activities, athlete's performance and condition, and people with disabilities. The research are oriented toward two complementary directions: Improving the relevancy of each sensor and increasing the number of sensors for having a more global synthetic and robust information.

A wearable, low-power, health-monitoring instrumentation based on a programmable system-on-chip^TM

“…This research involved the development of wearable and ambulatory monitoring systems [11] [12]. The ambulatory aspect of the device leads to a wide range of applications:…”

Centrale de mesure ambulatoire biomédicale sur PSoC

“…Ce travail de recherche s'inscrit dans le cadre des dévelop-pements de centrales de mesures de signaux physiologiques de plus en plus petites [9][10][11], leur donnant des caractéristiques indispensables pour une utilisation en ambulatoire.…”

PEDOT:PSS-Based Temperature-Detection Thread for Wearable Devices

“…As the interdisciplinary research between thread manufacturing and IT has recently accelerated, various cases of smart textile that incorporate display elements have been reported, and smart textile technology is evolving to integrate information-processing and data-transmission elements into textiles [9]. Smart textiles that incorporate sensors can be utilized in various applications such as in military [10], medical [11][12][13][14][15][16], fashion, and sport [17] applications. Because of their flexibility and stretchability, textiles can be easily applied to large surface areas, and approximately 70% of the surfaces that people touch every day (e.g., clothes, beds, wall materials, interior decorations, and floor materials) use textiles.…”