A comfortable health monitoring system named WEALTHY is presented. The system is based on a textile wearable interface implemented by integrating sensors, electrodes, and connections in fabric form, advanced signal processing techniques, and modern telecommunication systems. Sensors, electrodes and connections are realized with conductive and piezoresistive yarns. The sensorized knitted fabric is produced in a one step process. The purpose of this paper is to show the feasibility of a system based on fabric sensing elements. The capability of this system to acquire simultaneously several biomedical signals (i.e. electrocardiogram, respiration, activity) has been investigated and compared with a standard monitoring system. Furthermore, the paper presents two different methodologies for the acquisition of the respiratory signal with textile sensors. Results show that the information contained in the signals obtained by the integrated systems is comparable with that obtained by standard sensors. The proposed system is designed to monitor individuals affected by cardiovascular diseases, in particular during the rehabilitation phase. The system can also help professional workers who are subject to considerable physical and psychological stress and/or environmental and professional health risks.

Financed by the European Commission, a consortium of 23 European partners, consisting of universities, research institutions, industries, and organizations operating in the field of emergency management, is developing a new generation of "smart" garments for emergency-disaster personnel. Garments integrate newly developed wearable and textile solutions, such as commercial portable sensors and devices, in order to continuously monitor risks endangering rescuers' lives. The system enables detection of health-state parameters of the users (heart rate, breathing rate, body temperature, blood oxygen saturation, position, activity, and posture) and environmental variables (external temperature, presence of toxic gases, and heat flux passing through the garments), to process data and remotely transmit useful information to the operation manager. The European-integrated project, called ProeTEX (Protection e-Textiles: Micro-Nano-Structured fiber systems for Emergency-Disaster Wear) started on February, 2006 and will end on July, 2010. During this 4.5 years period, three subsequent generations of sensorized garments are being released. This paper proposes an overview of the project and gives a description of the second-generation prototypes, delivered at the end of 2008.

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The purpose of this study is to comparatively evaluate the performance of different wearable systems based on indirect breathing monitoring in terms of susceptibility to motion artifacts. These performances are compared with direct respiratory measurements using a spirometer, which is accurate, reliable, and less sensitive to movement artifacts, but cannot be integrated into truly wearable form. Experiments were carried out on four indirect methods implemented into wearable systems, inductive plethysmography, impedance plethysmography, piezoresistive pneumography, and piezoelectric pneumography, to ascertain the performance of each of them in terms of noise due to movement artifacts, as well as to study the effects of different movements or gestures during each test. A group of volunteers was asked to wear all of the breath monitoring systems simultaneously along with the face mask of the spirometer while carrying out four physical exercises in a gym under controlled conditions. Data are analyzed in the time and frequency domain to estimate the frequency respiration from each wearable system and compare it with those of the spirometer. Results confirmed that all the wearable systems are somehow affected by movement artifacts, but statistical investigation showed that for most of the physical exercises, three out of four, piezoelectric pneumography provided best performance in terms of robustness and reduced susceptibility to movement artifacts.