Wearable Sensors for Real-time Health and Sports Monitoring
This project focuses on the enhancement of outpatient care and preventative medicine. Standard health care can be costly and inconvenient depending on a person’s location and daily schedule. General health or long term diseases can be monitored at home given the proper equipment. In collaboration with adidas wearable sports electronics, we investigated the quality of the signal achieved from silver coated textile heart rate electrodes compared to standard Ag/AgCl disposable heart rate electrodes. In these studies we have found that textile electrodes provide a less accurate heart rate measurement during every day wear unless the user is sweating or regularly applying uncomfortable electrode gel.
Additionally, both sweat and strain sensors are being studied. With sweat sensing, hydration and NaCl levels can be monitored easily. This could aid in athletic training as well as monitoring the efficacy of therapeutic interventions that can be tracked through sweat biochemistry, e.g. cystic fibrosis. With the strain sensors, users can participate in rehabilitation and training regimens as well as disease monitoring in their homes, with rapid personalized feedback from computer or smartphone applications. Furthermore, the data harvested from these on-body sensors can be shared remotely with specialist consultants who can track progress ion an individual basis. Moving towards this model of personalised outpatient care can not only decrease health care costs but also increase a patient’s access to specialist care support in a much more flexible and geographically diverse manner.
Image of 2x15 cm fabric strain sensor (A) without strain taken at 150x magnification and (B) with strain taken at 250x magnification. (C) Graph of three 2x15 cm sensor resistance averages at 30, 40 and 50 percent strain. Error bars shown where n=5. Sensors were stretched using a Zwick tensile tester and resistance measurements recorded using a multimeter.
Projects were supported by Science Foundation Ireland under the Insight initiative, grantSFI/12/RC/2289, IRSES-GA-2010-269302 and adidas Wearable Sports Electronics.
Researchers involved in these projects include: Jennifer Deignan1, Simon Coleman1, Conor O'Quigley1, Syamak Farajikhah2, Ali Jeirani2, Paula Fitzpatrick5, Larisa Florea1, Michael McBrearty4, Javad Foroughi2,Giles Warrington5, Shirley Coyle1, Peter Innis2, Rita Paradiso3, Gordon Wallace2 and Dermot Diamond1
1Insight, National Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland.
2Intelligent Polymer Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia.
3Smartex s.r.l., Pisa, Italy.
4adidas Wearable Sports Electronics, Chadds Ford, PA, USA.
5School of Health and Human Performance, Dublin City University