Wearable "Smart T-shirt" Tracks Your Breathing — Using Flexible, Spiral Antennas
Clever wearable relies on how the signal strength differs as antennas sewn into the fabric deform.
A team of researchers from the Research Centre for Advanced Materials (CERMA), at Quebec's Université Laval, has unveiled a smart T-shirt designed to monitor the wearer's breathing — alerting to potential problems by tracking the deformations of small antennas.
"A new wearable smart T-shirt design for breathing rate monitoring using Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is proposed," the researchers explain in the abstract to their paper — relying on the differing performance of antennas as they move with the wearer's body to track breathing profiles, in an unusual twist on the wearable sensor approach.
As the wearer breathes, the shirt moves with them — and the spiral antennas, arranged around the chest, open and close. As they do, the signal strength alters — and that data can be analyzed to create a breathing profile, while changes from the baseline profile can be used to alert to possible breathing issues from choking to hyperventilation.
Each shirt has six sensors, arranged so that they can pick up the individual breathing patterns of a wearer whether they breathe from their chest or their stomach — automatically tuning to find the right mix of sensors to use.
"We believe that such technology will be very useful in hospitals, to reduce opioid overdose deaths, and prevent active people from [overexertion]," Amine Miled, associate professor, claimed in an interview on the work with IEEE Spectrum. "We are also able to detect a significant change in breathing amplitude, [as well as] inspiration and expiration [and sleep apnea.]"
The paper has been published as early-access in the journal IEEE Sensors under closed access terms; more information is available in IEEE Spectrum.