Having heart problems is no laughing matter, and most people will have to take plenty of medication, keep up a good exercise regime and watch their diet. They too, will need a heart rate monitor of some sort in order to make sure nothing untoward happens during the course of the day. These devices tend to be bulky, and they’re awkward to carry around. Enter the Vital Jacket heart rate monitor courtesy of BioDevices, which is actually an ordinary t-shirt that continuously monitors heart rate and ECG waves, making it one of the most ideal solution for elderly patients with plenty of potential for fitness applications too.

The Vital Jacket is a wearable vital signs monitoring system that joins textiles with microelectronics. It was designed and developed to be a usable pragmatic approach for different clinical and normal life scenarios, in hospitals, home or on the move, that need continuous or frequent high quality vital signs monitoring from the patient or healthy subject. The concept was designed and specified based on the long tradition on biomedical instrumentation and telemedicine of the IEETA institute of the University of Aveiro, Portugal. The Vital Jacket HWM mobile device is an intelligent wearable garment that is able to continuous monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) wave and Heart Rate for different fitness, high performance sports, security and medical applications.

Two versions are currently available - the HWM100 that stores all its data on an SD memory card for further analysis on a PC later on, while the HWM200 boasts on-line visualization using a smartphone/PDA. I wonder what the battery life on this thing is like, and certainly putting it in a regular washing machine without disconnecting wires or anything of that sort just won’t do. There is no word on pricing at the moment, but surely it can’t be dirt cheap!

Source: MedGadget