A Health-Shirt using e-Textile Materials for the Continuous and Cuffless Monitoring of Arterial Blood Pressure

Abstract

This paper proposes a health-shirt (h-Shirt) using e-textile materials for long-term and continuous monitoring of physiological parameters, including arterial blood pressure (BP) by a cuffless approach. BP measurements using the h-Shirt and the setup of a calibration technique for this approach were tested on 10 and 5 subjects respectively. The results demonstrated the potential of integrating the calibration and measurement techniques on the h-Shirt to develop a wearable, hands-free system for monitoring users' BP around the clock. Based on the h-Shirt, a convertible, universal health-suit (CUHS) is suggested to include both monitoring functions and bio-feedback mechanisms for real-time health management. The development of the h-Shirt and CUHS is instigated by our researches on building wearable intelligent sensors and systems for e-health (WISSH).