Monitoring of Heart and Respiration Rate Using a 3D Knitted T-shirt with Textile-based Electrodes

The emergence of e-textiles has facilitated impressive growth in the field of wearable technologies in recent years. Textile-based electrodes enabled long-period electrocardiogram monitoring within the health care field as they are less irritant to the skin and can be naturally embedded into the clothes. Beyond the specific health-oriented applications, physiological signals monitoring is also beneficial during other activities such as daily activities and sports. In this work, a system of a knitted t-shirt embedded with textile electrodes that targets measuring heart rate and respiration rate during various positions and activities is created. The performance of the implemented system is benchmarked against the performance of an off-the-shelf product using root mean square error. It has been shown that the proposed system can achieve good performance with heart rate respiration rate values close to that of the benchmark device.