Smart Shirt for Wireless Patient Monitoring

A shirt made from a special fabric interwoven with sensors can provide an ongoing stream of information on patient vital signs as the patient performs routine daily activities. The shirt will be based on a platform system of real-time data acquisition and wireless transmission of critical patient data.

Originally developed by a team of researchers at the School of Textile and Fiber Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA, USA). The shirt is being commercialized by Sensatex/LifeLink, Inc. (Dallas, TX, USA). The company is developing a dual platform comprising the Smart Shirt as the base hardware, and a wireless operating system that medical monitoring companies and other partners can use to write their own individual applications. These could range from infant monitoring to geriatric monitoring.

The Smart Shirt is essentially a wearable motherboard--a computer in the form of a t-shirt, explained Jeffrey Wolf, CEO of Sensatex. Our plan is to build the operating system and wireless platform for the Smart Shirt and work with others to develop specific applications for the platform.