Cardio-Respiratory Monitoring in Archery Using a Smart Textile Based on Flexible Fiber Bragg Grating Sensors

Abstract

In precision sports, the control of breathing and heart rate is crucial to help the body to remain stable in the shooting position. To improve stability, archers try to adopt similar breathing patterns and to have a low heartbeat during each shot. We proposed an easy-to-use and unobtrusive smart textile (ST) which is able to detect chest wall excursions due to breathing and heart beating. The sensing part is based on two FBGs housed into a soft polymer matrix to optimize the adherence to the chest wall and the system robustness. The ST was assessed on volunteers to figure out its performance in the estimation of respiratory frequency (fR) and heart rate (HR). Then, the system was tested on two archers during four shooting sessions. This is the first study to monitor cardio-respiratory activity on archers during shooting. The good performance of the ST is supported by the low mean absolute percentage error for fR and HR estimation (≤1.97% and ≤5.74%, respectively), calculated with respect to reference signals (flow sensor for fR, photopletismography sensor for HR). Moreover, results showed the capability of the ST to estimate fR and HR during different phases of shooting action. The promising results motivate future investigations to speculate about the influence of fR and HR on archers’ performance.

Wearable Belt With Built-In Textile Electrodes for Cardio—Respiratory Monitoring

“…Continuous monitoring and diagnosis through non-invasive measurements of vital signs represent two concrete technological responses to the challenges of care personalization and cost containment posed by modern medicine. Real-time, continuous and non-invasive measurement of physiological signals represents a key element for numerous applications, from patient monitoring in hospitals to home therapy [1], medical assistance and surveillance for the elderly [2], and athletic performance monitoring [3]. Nowadays, measuring vital signs continuously and non-invasively can be an invaluable tool for physicians that can make timely decisions and better choices when long-term patient data are available, preventing diseases and enhancing quality of life whilst reducing the costs of health care [4].…”

Sensing Systems for Respiration Monitoring: A Technical Systematic Review

“…This may be due to their insensitivity to electromagnetic fields, their high resistance to water and corrosion, and their compact size and low weight [ 125 ]. This technology also allows monitoring different types of physiological parameters simultaneously [ 278 ]. In addition, resistive sensors and accelerometers were the second and third most widely used technologies.…”

Fiber Bragg Gratings for Medical Applications and Future Challenges: A Review

“…For instance, in [191], a rectangular-shaped flexible sensor based on FBG technology was calibrated to retrieve static and dynamic metrological characteristics showing strain sensitivity one order of magnitude bigger than the temperature ones, negligible relative humidity-induced contributions, and acceptable hysteresis errors. Then, the proposed sensor was used to instrument two elastic bands for monitoring mean and breath-by-breath RR values from the thorax and abdomen movements during tests in lab and out-of-lab (i.e., during simulated archery races) [180].…”

“…Recently, a first effort in the definition of fiducial points has been done in [180], [191] where an elastic based instrumented by a flexible sensor based on a single FBG was positioned on three measurement sites (i.e., xiphoid process, umbilicus and below the left mammilla) of 3 volunteers to investigate the site influence on the signal amplitudes. Significant differences were found during both inter-and intra-volunteer analysis, suggesting the influence of anthropometry and sensor pre-stretching.…”