E-textile technology has spawned a t-shirt that noninvasively monitors a patient’s vital signs and accurately tracks his or her location inside a hospital or other building. It can even tell if the patient is seated, reclining or moving about. Designed for use in hospitals, the device also has potential for in-home recuperation and ambient assisted living.

The prototype tanktop was developed with the participation of la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid as part of the LOBIN consortium, which is dedicated to the development of wireless networks in hospitals. The product was developed and is being commercialised by Spanish company Nuubo.

The system’s mobile unit—let’s call it a t-shirt, shall we?—is embedded with electrodes and fitted with a removable pocket-sized pack that includes a thermometer, accelerometer and localisation device. The data is transmitted wirelessly to an associated information management system that can pinpoint the patient’s location to within a couple of metres and display his or her vital signs in real time.

The research was first presented in “LOBIN E-Textile and Wireless Sensor Network-based Platform for Healthcare Monitoring in Future Hospital Environments” in IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

source:medtechinsider