Wear Your Smart Shirt!

Wearables also continue to be big, with companies and entrepreneurs literally trying to cover every body part with connectivity and sensors.

Montreal's Hexoskin announced a new smart shirt, which measures its wearer's cardiac and breathing activity. The shirt, as well as the tracking device that slips into it, sells for $449 in Canada.

Hexoskin chief executive Pierre-Alexandre Fournier says the shirt works better than wrist-worn fitness trackers in activities such as martial arts, boxing or basketball.

"We measure things that are hard to measure on the wrist," he says. "And if you want to do team sports, you can't wear things on your wrist." (photo and excerpts from: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ces-2016-memorable-products-1.3395511)

Features: Every move you make, every breath you take, it's tracking you

Hexoskin's shirts are built to monitor everything that's happening beneath the surface when you exercise. It tracks heart rate, heart rate variability, VO2 max, breathing rate and volume, and the usual steps, calories, cadence, and sleep. Before you start tracking, you'll have to make sure the sensor pack is connected to the Hexoskin mobile app, which may seem obvious but I had some issues with this. Sometimes the pack would be on, not yet attached to the shirt, and the app wouldn't recognize it.

Turning your smartphone's Bluetooth settings off then on again usually fixes this—but then make sure to keep your smartphone within Bluetooth range of the pack. Before a workout, I went into my kitchen to grab some water with the pack attached to the Hexoskin tank I was wearing. My smartphone, left in the other room, lost connection immediately and it took at least five minutes for it to be restored. To avoid unnecessary wait time before you start a workout, just keep your phone on you at all times.

After the shirt is properly connected and running, you can go about your training, tracking specific workouts and activities using the app. There are fitness tests you can complete to assess your starting point as well, including ones for resting heart rate and VO2 max. When the shirt first turns on, it will automatically start monitoring real-time heart rate, breathing rate, and breathing volume. You can watch the change in all three of these stats from within the app, and it's cool to see things like how much air you're taking in on each breath.

The garment itself is quite a passive device—you just put it on and it does all the heavy lifting from there. Although, I do wish you could set fitness goals and keep track of them using the shirt and its app. While Hexoskin made a great piece of smart clothing that takes most of the energy out of monitoring exercise, it doesn't give any insight on how to perform better. It also doesn't let you set step, calorie, or heart rate goals. (excerpts from http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/02/hexoskin-smart-shirt-reviewed-measuring-your-vitals-so-you-dont-have-to/)

No Heart Attack: Electronic Heart Sleeve

The future of medicine: This custom-fit membrane is woven with a network of electrodes that sense body movement and regulate blood flow - it might one day prevent heart attacks in humans

Scientists have created an external membrane using a 3-D printer than can keep a heart beating virtually forever. The thin membrane is elastic, designed to stretch over a heart like a glove, and is outfitted with tiny electrodes that monitor cardiac function – it was first demonstrated as a proof of concept on a rabbit heart. Researchers at both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University published the astonishing breakthrough in nature, and hope it will someday help prevent heart attacks in humans.

It is about 10-15 years away from being made available to humans, but the revolutionary device might be a long-term solution to these normally catastrophic events. The team told Gizmodo’s Sploid that they were able to custom fit it to the rabbit’s heart by using computers to scan it’s surface area and put together a mold for the membrane. They then put it together and wove it with a spider web-like network of electrodes that interact with the rest of the body to regulate heart beat – it’s light years ahead of a pacemaker. ‘This artificial pericardium is instrumented with high quality, man-made devices that can sense and interact with the heart in different ways that are relevant to clinical cardiology,’ researcher John Rorgers said.

Those sensors track tissue movement and use the signals the nervous system, would normally send to the heart to regulate pulse. This methodology allows the device to keep the heart beating even when a heart attack or arrhythmia occurs.

From:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2571917/Membrane-heart-pumping-forever-possibly-prevent-heart-attacks.html