Packing for shoe polish is taken as a form factor and a T-shirt with sewn metal threads - this is how the new invention begins, which in the future can become a useful gadget for many people. There is a sensor inside the future device that consists of a battery, a controller, an accelerometer, a charger and most importantly an ECG module.
Such invention of the scientists from the Institute of Sport, Tourism and Service of SUSU (ISTIS) will allow monitoring the work of the heart and compiling data for doctors. The device can be useful for sports medicine, but the scientists of SUSU are trying to adapt its functions for daily use. For example, to monitor the health of people who have heart problems, especially people at high risk of heart attacks and strokes, which often affect older people. According to the idea of scientists, if a person suddenly suffers from a heart attack, the device will automatically transmit data about it to the relatives of the injured. This will help to provide the necessary assistance in time.
"A fabric with silver as an electrode and conductive metal threads are used to produce such a T-shirt. It took just a week to design an ECG T-shirt. The next stage is programming, which is much more complicated. Now we have to solve a complex task - we need to make the signal as clear as possible and adapt the ready algorithms to our device," says the inventor of the ECG T-shirt and the employee of ISTIS, the scientific consultant of the Center for Sports Science Aleksei Smirnov.
The future gadget will be very compact and will not exceed the matchbox in size. Data from the device will be transferred to the smartphone via bluetooth. For this a separate application will be designed.
The gadget will combine the facilities of modern fitness trackers and fitness bracelets and will collect and analyze data: pulse, time, intensity level of loads, number of steps, etc. In addition, it will monitor the risks of cardiovascular diseases.
"You can forget to put on a fitness tracker, but not a T-shirt or sports jersey. Therefore, our device will monitor your health 24 hours a day. We are going to make our device waterproof and with the ability to use wireless charge. This will allow users to wash the T-shirt with the built-in tracker in the washing machine," the scientists adds.
The distribution, planned for the near future, is small-scale sales through sport stores with the purpose to obtain feedback from athletes. After product modernization, the inventors plan to offer their development to famous sports brands. Thus, for example, a fashion designer from Moscow is ready to join the project when the invention passes the final stages of testing.
It should be mentioned that the development is a joint project of SUSU scientists and the pupil from the vocational school No. 97 Aleksandr Pasynkov, who became the winner of the program for young scientists "UMNIK".
Sports science of ISTIS has been developing rapidly. The scientists work on the projects that are topical today and can be implemented in a short period of time. One of these were innovative inner soles for Fiziostep shoes, which are sold successfully in Russia and abroad today.