Here's something regarding an apparent competitor of LifeShirt, for those familiar with that company. For those who aren't, go back and read this thread more carefully <g>.
From the current issue of iHealthcare Weekly:
FOCUS ON WIRELESS
Wearing the Motherboard: Sensatex Develops Shirt for Wireless
Healthcare
by Paul Farrell, iHW Contributor
This article was originally published in PervasiveWeekly on September 7,
2000.
Clothing is the ultimate interface, says the man who plans to market a
garment within the next year that captures and records medical
diagnostic information.
Sundaresan Jayaraman, a professor of Textile Engineering at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, has a wearable motherboard in mind
when he talks about that ultimate interface. Garments can, of course,
denote rank or social status. How about a "smart shirt" that monitors
EKG, heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature?
"All of that, and a whole range of other types of medical information," said
Jayaraman, whose idea for a shirt that could monitor the condition of its
wearer was, like so much new technology, originally developed for the
military. "I was originally approached with the idea of a shirt that could not
only detect where a person had been shot, but the depth of the wound
and the damage it had caused. I wrote a white paper, and then came up
with a full application, which is what we are developing now, the wearable
motherboard."
The shirt has non-invasive sensory equipment sewn directly into its fabric
that can, for example, monitor the heart rate of the wearer. If it detects a
problem it can, using mobile Internet technology, notify the wearer's
physician, who can prescribe medication, or even the patient, who can
then take appropriate action.
The information is transmitted digitally to the Internet via a pager-sized
unit worn at the hip. Along with heart rate, the current prototype, called the
Georgia Tech Wearable Motherboard, can also monitor pulse rates,
temperature, breathing, and voice data.
Jayaraman, who is also the chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board for
Sensatex, the company developing the shirt, said the key to broad-based
applications will be the shirt's "open architecture." Along with diagnostic
sensors woven into the shirt, it will also have features that will allow
numerous other remote, non-obtrusive devices to be attached or
removed at will. A shirt can then have a sensorium that is essentially
customized for the wearer's medical needs.
Or professional ones. Garments for firefighters could be rigged to
monitor the wearer's oxygen levels via pulse oxymetry, and issue an alert
when those levels are dangerously low. For more standard medical
applications, the smart shirt makes the best of unobtrusive technology to
acquire accurate data and provide patient mobility. If anything, Jayaraman
said, the shirt could improve data reliability.
"I remember a sleep monitoring situation where a person had to get to
sleep with all these wires coming off him," he said. "How is a person
supposed to get to sleep like that? How much data can you get? I think
that with the wearable motherboard, the patient is providing information in
a relaxed, normal setting, not in a doctor's office. This means that the
quality of information retrieved is good, plus the quality of life for the
wearer is immeasurably improved."
"It's certainly got great promise," said iLifeSytems Chairman Michael
Lerhman. His company is developing a wearable monitor, the Health
Sensor 100, that can notify emergency services or family members if a
patient has a serious fall. Although not quite the same as the smart shirt,
it is moving along the same lines as other medical applications that are
worn by the patient.
"There are over 35 million people in the United States that are over 65,
and of those, over 10 million live alone. A trip or fall can have
catastrophic results for this population. We wanted to come up with
something that had consumer application, not just diagnostic ones. Ours
is not a device for doctors, it is just something that a certain portion of the
population can wear," Lehrman said.
Identifying a market is, of course, of critical importance for anyone with
new technology. Seed-One Capital Ventures CEO Jeff Wolf said in the
U.S., there are approximately 15 million persons who use some sort of
pulmonary monitoring annually. There are 20 million who use some sort
of cardiac monitoring each year, and there are 3.9 million annual births, of
which several hundred thousand are neo-natals, meaning premature
births that require extra monitoring. The market is there, which is why New
York City-based Seed-One is providing initial funding.
Seed-One is a unique VC firm in that it only invests in one project at a
time, and also does the grunt work of locating clients, developing trials,
and bringing products to market. In a recent Village Voice article,
Seed-One's hands-on approach to its clients has been called "morphing"
into the client's companies themselves, something CEO Jeff Wolf
cheerfully admits.
"Whom we ultimately market to depends on the type of applications in
the base platform," Wolf said. Sensatex is developing the base platform,
or the open-ended wearable motherboard. Other companies, such as
existing medical software and device companies, will develop the
specialized applications and market the end product.
Most likely, initial applications will be aimed at the infant and geriatric
monitoring market, or for patients with bad hearts, for example. Other
"low-hanging fruit" includes police and military, firemen and pilots. Costs
for the garment have not yet been determined, but should be competitive
with existing wired devices and systems.
"I think that ultimately, wireless diagnostic devices will become
ubiquitous," Lawrence Kingsland, Assistant Director for Applied
Informatics at the National Library of Medicine. "As with other wireless
applications, the challenge is getting information from the subject to the
point of need, in this case, the patient's physician." Kingsland also
pointed out that with the multiple leads provided by the smart shirt, data
would be just as reliable as that measured with conventional, hard-wired
systems.
One of the most dramatic applications of the smart shirt is in Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). A blanket with breathing sensors could
be wrapped around an infant, with an alarm installed for any heart
stoppage or breathing irregularity.
"Some of the stories I have gotten over e-mail have been absolutely
heart-wrenching," said Jayaraman, with an honesty that is conveyed even
over a long-distance phone connection. "I have heard from women who
have lost children to SIDS, and want me to provide them with a smart
garment that can keep it from happening again so they can have children.
We want to bring this market within the next year or so, because I truly
think it will help a lot of people."
Within 5 to 10 years, Jayaraman predicts, people will no longer carry cell
phones or electronic organizers. Instead they'll dial or type on wireless
fabric keyboards knitted into or embroidered on their clothes -- or even
talk into voice-recognition shirt collars -- and send the messages via a
small electronic device, akin to a pager, attached to a belt or contained in
a watch face.
Feedback: mailto:letters@siliconalleyreporter.com |
