Health Care with Wellness Wear

Abstract

As the new medical practice paradigm of ubiquitous health care has gradually evolved, "smart" clothes with noninvasive sensors that obtain biosignals, such as ECG, respiration, SpO2, and blood pressure data, have great potential (Axisa et al., 2005; Lauter, 2003). We call such clothes "wellness wear." A wellness wear system is an integration of biosensors that attach to clothes, digital yarns that transmit biosignals and other data, integrated circuits and microprocessors that process those signals, wired and wireless communication, and software applications that process and analyze vital signs obtained from the biosensors. The need for wellness wear systems is clear. Wellness wear enables the continuous monitoring of health conditions at any time and place because the clothing is worn continuously. Thus, the use of wellness wear can promote easier home care. Both patients and nonpatients experience efficient and comfortable health care and disease prevention (Saranummi, 2002). This is particularly important because as the aging population increases, the interest in quality of life grows quickly. Undoubtedly, the physical boundaries and distances that restrict doctors‘ treatments can be reduced. Generally, wearable systems provide real-time feedback about one’s long-term health condition, and can even provide alarms in potentially health-threatening situations (Pantelopoulos and Bourbakis, 2010). From an economic point of view, the increasing cost of medicine will be also reduced by the usage of wellness wear because some portion of expensive traditional health-care practices will be replaced. Despite the need, however, there is not yet a stable market for wellness wear. Additionally, it has not achieved its goal of providing either low-cost or ubiquitous health-care services. One critical reason for this is that biosensors attached to clothes cause motion artifacts; thus, the quality of biosignals may be unreliable. This means that they have not yet been validated clinically. Many sensors can also cause skin irritation or allergies. Further, wellness wear is not of sufficient quality in terms of fashion, usability, and acceptability in consumer culture. There are probably more reasons that wellness wear has not been successful nor actively commercialized; the major reason is likely that wellness wear is still in its infancy. We believe that the currently immature technical, clinical, and cultural aspects of wellness wear will gradually improve, eventually increasing its use. In this chapter, we shed some light on health care with smart clothes. First, we briefly review previously introduced smart health clothes. Second, as an example, we present a wellness wear system that we are developing that assists with weight loss by using software called the Calorie Tracker, which works together with wellness wear.