High-Tech Clothing to Improve Seniors' Quality of Life

Experts at the University of Ulster, in the United Kingdom, are currently engaged in a three-year effort to construct electronic devices and high-tech clothes that will have the potential to make the life of senior citizens a lot more pleasant in their golden years. The fabrics will be endowed with numerous types of sensors, which will be able to assess a person's medical condition with relative ease. In case risk factors for stroke, or heart failure start to act up, then the clothes could alert their users and the ambulance as to the incoming threat, BBC News reports.

 

Several research teams from a number of universities in the UK are participating in this initiative, which is funded by the New Dynamics of Aging Programme. The ultimate goal is to have clothes that are so high-tech that they can monitor heart rates, or give useful bus and tram information with the same ease. The electronic devices would have to be fairly small, so as not to make people uncomfortable, or draw attention on themselves.

 

Over the last years, the Computer Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster has been engaged in active research in the fields of assistive technologies, so participating in the new research program is only natural. Their main areas of focus in their own studies was independent living and healthcare monitoring, two concepts that will go along nicely with sensor technology, its director, professor Bryan Scotne, said.

 

“This project is particularly exciting as we will be working with partners with complementary expertise that will enable our research in sensor technologies, data fusion and intelligent data analysis to have a real impact on people's everyday lives,” he said of the initiative.

 

“Essentially, once the data on the movements of older people is recorded, it is then passed to SESRI and we will make sense of it in a lifestyle capacity. This information can then in turn be used by those developing the garments, to understand better the most effective usage of the technology in the clothing,” said Sport and Exercise Research Institute director, Dr. Eric Wallace.