PERSONALISED HEALTH MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

There is a growing need of renovation in our health care managingsystems; people need to be more interactive and more conscious of their ownhealth condition in a way to adjust incorrect lifestyles, to obtain a personalizedtherapy tuned to their own physiological reactions and on their own environmentalcondition. To gain knowledge of a citizen’s health status and to monitor withoutharassing them (until they refuse any medical supervision), a comfortable remotemonitoring of important physiological parameters is necessary. The approach istherefore to integrate system solutions into functional clothes with integratedtextile sensors. The combination of functional clothes and integrated electronicsand on-body processing, is defined as e-textile and gives rise to intelligentbiomedical clothes. Systems, designed to be minimally invasive, are based onsmart textile technologies, where conductive and piezoresistive materials in theform of fiber and yarn are used to realize clothes, in which knitted fabric sensorsand electrodes are distributed and connected to an electronic portable unit. Thesesystems are able to detect, acquire and transmit physiological signals. They areconformable to the human body, and move towards improving the patient’s qualityof life and their autonomy. These systems are also cost-effective in providingaround-the-clock assistance, in helping physicians to monitor for example cardiacpatients during periods of rehabilitation, and in addition result in decreasedhospitalization time. Finally, by providing direct feedback to the users, theyimprove their awareness and potentially allow better control of their owncondition, while the simultaneous recording of vital signs permits parameterextrapolation and inter-signal elaboration that contributes to produce alertmessages and personalized synoptic tables of the patient’s health.