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PUBLICATION – Smart Garments: New method of On-body edge computing for non-invasive, remote healthcare monitoring

Posted: 18-06-2021

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Outline the paper
This paper focuses on the need for a non-invasive and remote health-monitoring solution with inbuilt on-body edge computing, and how enabling such sensing and computing capabilities in a fabric environment can act as a new method for healthcare monitoring through the use of embedded computing intelligence in smart garments.

This study proposes an alternative and new technique in conducting on-body edge computing. We propose embroidering programmable capabilities directly into the garment to allow the Boolean logic circuits to be reconfigured to facilitate new applications or changes in the user’s requirements, providing a more personalized and safer approach to health monitoring at an individual level. The proposed approach uses the concept of programmable logic arrays (PLAs) found in typical electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM) chips and embroiders the logic gate circuit directly into a garment.

The programmable capability comes in the form of interchanging the stitching connections between the wired bus planes (horizontal and vertical wires) from the different logic gates, in the very same way that the connections between the wired busses in the EEPROM can be reprogrammed. Our proposed solution enables the computing to be performed on the garment itself and through wired connections, where data from the sensors are computed through the logic circuits, and the output can be a summary (e.g., “Yes” or “No”) of data that are transmitted wirelessly.

Who will it help?
The focus of this research was based around its application as a healthcare monitoring smart garment for hypertension and epilepsy based use cases. Based on embedded sensors in a smart garment, their readings can be fed into the On-Body edge computing smart garment allowing for inbuilt computational analysis to be completed in the etextile smart garment itself. This provides a real-time on-body analysis and results alert notification for the user, providing them with on the spot alerts linked to the datasets being read by the inbuilt sensors.

What is the future of this research?
Next steps for this research area, is the addition of actual real sensors into the garment, actively feeding the datasets into the embroidered and integrated PLA allowing for real time analysis of varying health based monitoring sensors.

With regards industry applications of this research, this is predominately focused on the use of such smart garments in the healthcare sector. Having this inbuilt analysis in the garment through the embroidered logic gate PLA, allows for active monitoring of wearers with health conditions that need to be monitored. This application removed the need for an external mobile device or other monitoring device for data to be transmitted to and computed, in order to give a result.  Having the computational element built into the garment allows for an on-body edge computing analysis and alert notification to be achieved.

Publication Title: On-Body Edge Computing Through E-Textile Programmable Logic Array
Authors: Frances ClearyDavid C. Henshall and Sasitharan Balasubramaniam
Publication Date: 11 June 2021
Journal: Frontiers in Communication and Networks, Non conventional communications and Networks.
Link to publication: 
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frcmn.2021.688419/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Communications_and_Networks&id=68841