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