Wearable Tech: This T-Shirt Will Monitor Your Heart And Read Your Vital Signs

This article was first published on The Times of Israel and was re-posted with permission.

An Israeli company is one of the first in the world to market with a T-shirt that can read a patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac irregularities, and other vital signs that could be the key to preventing heart attacks. Speed is the key — data is generated in real time and reaches the doctor immediately, instead of waiting until the next scheduled exam. And you can throw the special T-shirt in the laundry with the rest of your clothes.

HealthWatch debuted its hWear line of 15-lead ECG-sensing garments at the recent annual meeting of the American Telemedicine Association. It allows doctors and medical workers to keep track of a heart condition remotely, without having to hook the patient up to a heart-measuring device in a doctor’s office.

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It’s made with standard cotton or synthetic yarn, with special electrodes woven in that include extremely thin electrocardiogram sensors that read vital signs and upload them to a monitoring device via Bluetooth or a Wifi connection to a cloud-based database, where the data is processed. If anything abnormal is detected, the patient’s doctors can be alerted, and a treatment protocol can be instituted right away.

“Our hWear T-shirt garments measure the highest quality vital signs all without adhesives, gels, or shaving preparations for both men and women. The garments are machine washable and compatible with most cardiac telemetry systems,” according to Uri Amir, HealthWatch CEO.

Health Watch. Courtesy

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Currently, the T-shirts are registered with the FDA as Class I devices, but the company is applying to have them “upgraded” to Class II devices, so they can be used in professional medical settings. Only a few other companies have come out with similar shirts, so HealthWatch is ahead of the curve, said Amir. “The eHealth, TeleHealth, mHealth, and tele-cardiology industries can now deploy intensive-care quality telemonitoring without affecting the lifestyle of their users ranging from patients within a hospital environment, to homecare settings, to heart attack survivors, to the active elderly seeking better coverage of their health, or to users wishing to have direct contact with their expert personal physician from anywhere.”

To continue reading this article on the TOI site, click here.