Performance Monitoring

Wearable Technology to monitor performance

How 'High-Performance Clothing' Will Power Your Phone And Monitor Your Health

Performance clothing isn’t just about monitoring performance during training.If you had a heart condition, or diabetes, getting on-the-spot data about your condition from the clothing you wear could revolutionize your treatment. People who live with conditions ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer's rely on medical devices that monitor symptoms, perform diagnoses, and even provide treatment. Some, like insulin pumps, are worn on the body. The trouble is that many of these devices are bulky or inconvenient.

Researchers specializing in nanotechnology are developing ways to build materials and machines that can be worn comfortably by patients either inside or outside the skin.

Nanotechnologist David Carroll of Wake Forest University has invented a material— which he calls "power felt“- which might change the way we practice medicine. Unlike the thermoelectric materials currently available, Carroll's fabric is lightweight, feels like wool felt, and can be wrapped around surfaces or even sewn into clothing. That is because it is made from sheets of carbon nanotubes instead of the ceramics materials usually used to make thermoelectrics. With a manufacturing cost of somewhere around 25 cents for a couple of square feet, the stuff is cheap to manufacture. Carroll says that a lot can be known about a person's physiology just through carefully measuring changes in body temperature and respiration. This information can say a lot about symptoms a person might be experiencing or an injury someone might have. For example, infected areas are often hotter than normal and, because it collects power from the heat of the body, it eliminates the need for batteries, which add weight to the sensors and can cause discomfort.

There are some really interesting applications for high-performance clothing on which testing is on going. The high-performance clothing will not only produce power but also be used for health monitoring.It also manages to collect information that alerts when an elderly person is at risk of falling or with an Alzheimer's patient, it can help to monitor certain bodily functions, check the respiration of the skin, and other checks such as sugar levels.All of these functionalities need power associated with them, and most of those cases, for Alzheimer's patients, for people who are really elderly, for children with disabilities the difficulty will be having a power source to measure these functions..So having a material which will power itself from the body temperature will make the use of it easy.The power felt will not only measure the temperature of the wearer but also power itself from that temperature.

The Fraunhofer FitnessSHIRT includes textile electrodes – conductive portions of fabric – that pick up electrical activity from the cardiac muscle, as well as an elastic band around the chest that measures breathing. The shirt tracks both medical and performance measures, including heart rate, respiratory activity, arterial oxygen saturation, posture and movement. An electronic unit snaps into the shirt for monitoring and removes easily for washing. The unit houses the battery, stores data and provides for wireless transmission. The device is not yet approved as a medical device, but Fraunhofer envisions it being useful for medical tracking and care of high-risk populations (e.g. those with heart conditions), monitoring emergency responders' vital signs in dangerous environments, fitness tracking, and use in biofeedback therapy and stress management.

South Korea's Kolon Glotech, Inc. are producing a new generation of heated clothing. It calls its Heatex technology the world's first heat-generating textile. Instead of simply relying on heating wires routed through the fabric or removable heating elements, Heatex fabric uses a conductive polymer to create the heat itself. The fabric is pliable, so will presumably look and feel like a normal piece of clothing and as it is water and wind-proof, it can serves as both the outer layer and heating unit. This kind of clothing could have benefits in eliminating hyperthermia in the elderly or for those who live in extreme climates.

The T.Jacket from Singaporean company T.Ware delivers the deep pressure of a hug. The accompanying smartphone app allows a parent, teacher or guardian to give "a hug" from anywhere, and integrated airbags in the vest simulate it. The jacket allows for varying levels of pressure to be applied to different parts of the body, creating a more personalized form of remote physical interaction. The app also allows the parent to track the location and activities of the child using the T.Jacket.The T.Jacket was designed specifically for children with sensory processing issues, including those with autism spectrum disorder and ADHD.