Researchers Develop Smart Sleepwear With Health-Monitoring Function

Many scientists predict that garment in the future will come with portable, unobtrusive devices to monitor respiratory rhythm and heart-rate during sleep. However, at the moment, a group of researchers has developed a physiological-sensing sleepwear called phyjamas.

Smart phyjamas

This group composes of two graduate students S. Zohreh Homayounfar and Ali Kiaghadi, their materials chemist professor-Trisha L. Andrew and a computer scientist-Deepak Ganesan. They have introduced their sleepwear with health-monitoring function at the UK Ubicomp 2019 conference.

Professors L.Andrew has explained that usually, people think that smart garments refer to pieces of tight clothing which feature various sensors to measure physical and physiological signals. But that is not the answer for casual clothing, especially, sleepwear.

Ganesan said that their team's insight was on the fact that we wear our sleepwear loosely, but there are still parts of it pressed or touched our body. It is because of our sleeping posture and the contact we have with the bed's surface. That includes pressure our body creates when pressed against a bed or chair. Sensors could be applied in those regions to measure the movements caused by breathing and heartbeats.

The difficulties

The challenge is that the signals could be unreliable individually, especially with loose-fitting garments. However, signals from various sensors across different regions on our body could be combined to get a much more accurate reading.

The team explained that they had to work on different ideas to realize their vision. In the process, they understood that there was no existing fabric-based way to sense dynamic and continuous pressure changes.

They finally came up with a brand new pressure sensor (fabric-based) and incorporated it with a triboelectric sensor - to make a new type of distributed sensor which suits their purpose.

The team also developed a data analytics method to combine signals from various regions on the body, taking into account the signal's quality.

They have performed several users studies in both natural and controlled settings. They showed that this sleepwear could extract our heartbeat peaks with high accuracy and breathing rate as well as predicting sleep posture perfectly.