Telemonitoring of vital parameters with newly designed biomedical clothing

The paper describes the development of biomedical clothing for ambulatory telemonitoring of human vital parameters. VTAM (Vetement de Tele-Assistance Medicale) presents a T-shirt made from textile with woven wires and incorporating four smooth dry ECG electrodes, a breath rate sensor, a shock/fall detector and two temperature sensors. The garment is equipped for the signal pre-computing and transmission through a miniature GSM/GPRS module kept on a belt together with the power supply. Three VTAM prototypes have been tested on persons in a normal state of health using a medical protocol to assess the biomedical data that include an ECG reading, a pneumogram, temperature and fall detection in mobile situations.