Problem
Cardiac Arrest is the most common medical cause of death in athletes. Sudden cardiac arrest in young athletes is usually caused by a structural or electrical abnormality in the heart. These abnormalities often remain undiagnosed and may be unknown to the athlete. Left unmonitored, this creates a huge risk to the athlete’s life.
Solution
My product allows the athlete to have peace of mind that they are in good hands and their heart health is being monitored safely. With the connected app, the player, coach, and clinician can access data from the vest. This allows the athlete’s progression to be monitored and any problematic data to be analysed by a medical professional.
There are three separate patches of conductive fabric stitched into the vest that act as the electrodes for the
3-lead ECG. The patches are purposefully large in size to allow a range of users to be able to wear the vest and still get an accurate reading of their heart.
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The proposed commercial electronics and vest design can be seen in the renders on the right. The circuit board would include the nano GPS sensor and ECG processing chip on the same board to save space. For the functioning prototype the sensors were on separate boards and interfaced together using an Arduino Uno. The two sensors were then coded and tested to receive successful outputs onto plotting software.
3-LEAD ECG COMPRESSION VEST
This was my final year major project at Loughborough University. "Sanitas" is a compression vest for footballers that incorporates smart conductive fabric to create a 3-lead ECG vest.
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"Sanitas" empowers athletes to take charge of their heart health. The electrodes are made from silver conductive fabric that links back to the performance tracker using conductive thread. The compression vest connects to an app that will display all of the player’s heart data for analysis. The vest features GPS tracking that can be used for the player’s development, as well as calorie expenditure, and diet.
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FUNCTIONING PROTOTYPE
As part of the project I manufactured a functioning prototype in order to test the concept with potential users. The vest was stitched together using a combination of elastic and nylon straps with polyester/elastane material used for the electronics pocket and chest panel.
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The smart fabric and thread was stitched into the completed vest and various tests were ran using a plotting software to read the heart rhythm of the user.
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This prototype proved that the smart fabric works for reading the heart of the user but needs further refinement to get rid of motion artefacts that occur on the ECG output.