Clevertex - Grado Zero Espace Srl

2.9.2.2 My Heart
The MyHeart project is a 3¾ year lasting IST Integrated Project, started on 31st of December 2003,
whose goal is to gain knowledge on a citizen’s actual health status by continuous monitoring of vital
signs. The consortium consists of 33 different partners from 11 countries. It integrates system
solutions into functional clothes with integrated textile sensors. The combination of functional clothes
and integrated electronics capable of processing them on-body can be defined as intelligent
biomedical clothing. The processing consists of making diagnoses, detecting trends and reacting to
them. Together with feedback devices, able to interact with the user as well as with professional
services, the MyHeart system is formed.
This system is suitable for supporting citizens to fight major CVD risk factors and help to avoid heart
attack, other acute events by personalized guidelines and giving feedback. It provides the necessary
motivation to adopt the new life styles [214].
In order to sense different body parameters, scientists at the Wearable Computing Laboratory at the
ETH in Zurich developed together with the company Sefar Inc. a System-on-Textiles, which is a
woven fabric with thin insulated copper fibres, as shown in Fig. 118.
Fig. 118 Conductive Textile: System-on-Textiles [215]
In order to create an arbitrary conductor path within the textile, single copper wires must be connected
at crossing points. This connection forms a textile via, the fundamental building block for a connecting
structure in fabrics. As there is a linear dependency of temperature of the copper wires and their
electrical resistance, the fabric is capable to measure temperature. Due to the usage of the wires as
warp and weft material, a grid like structure is formed which enables to locate the hot spot by
measuring the resistances of warps and wefts.
For the purpose of sensing pressure, the researchers developed a pressure sensor mat made out of a
spacer fabric with embroidered electrically conductive patch arrays on both sides. With this system,
the sitting posture can be detected. Each opposing patch pair in the array forms a plate capacitor
whose capacity changes with compression force on the spacer fabric.
Finally, a prototype T-shirt with textile and rigid off-the-shelf sensors was developed [215].
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