Friday, March 02, 2007
senSAVE (Sensor Assistance for Vital Events) Shirts for Medical Monitoring
Via medGadget
Six Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany have spent two years working on a system that can record the main cardiovascular functions 24 hours a day over a long period of time, even away from the doctor’s office, and enables communication with qualified medical staff.
The key components of the mobile health assistant were developed in a joint Fraunhofer project entitled senSAVE® (Sensor Assistance for Vital Events). Along with comfortable, easy-to-wear sensors that constantly measure all the necessary data and transmit them by radio to a PDA, the assistant has the necessary software to collect and analyze the flood of information and send it via Internet or mobile network to a telemedical support center, where trained staff can assess how critical the situation is, advise patients over the phone, and call a doctor if necessary.
It was a challenging task to find suitable electrodes for channeling the ECG readings, as they would need to be in permanent contact with the patient’s skin for days at a time. The Fraunhofer researchers developed a highly flexible dry electrode that can be woven into the elastic fibers of a sensor shirt. Potential wearers are fitted with their own tailor-made sensor shirt. The sheer pressure of the garment is sufficient to establish contact between the skin and the adhesive electrodes. A second layer of fabric covers the sensor wiring and the electronic circuit board.