Design of Smart Clothing with Automatic Cardiovascular Diseases Detection

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most important information for cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) diagnosis. In recent year, several dry electrode-based smart clothes have been widely developed to improve the skin allergic reaction and gel-drying issue from conventional Ag/AgCl electrode under long-term measurement. However, most of these dry electrodes still have to contact with skin and may encounter the risk of skin irritation, and many smart clothing systems lack of automatic CVDs detection. In this article, a novel smart clothing was designed to automatically detect CVDs in daily life. Based on the technique of capacitive electrodes, the proposed smart clothing could access the bio-potential across the clothes to prevent the skin from irritation and discomfort, and could adapt to different body sizes by the specific belt mechanical design. Moreover, the CVDs detection algorithm was also designed and implemented in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) based ECG analysis module. The experiment results show that the proposed smart clothing could effectively real-time extract ECG features (P-, R-, and T-waves) and detect CVDs state via the front-end circuit, including bradycardia, tachycardia, atrial fibrillation, left ventricular hypertrophy, first-degree atrioventricular block, and hyperkalemia. The proposed FPGA architecture is also beneficial for future revisions or additions of CVD algorithms to improve more accurate diagnosis and monitoring of heart disease. It might reduce huge ECG data collected in daily life via only transmitting the abnormal ECG segment, and improve the diagnostic efficiency of CVDs in the future.