Wearable Smart Garment Devices for Passive Biomedical Monitoring

The discovery of the applicability of radio-frequency identification (RFID) for inductive coupling to a stretchable fabric antenna has enabled biomedical sensing applications using wearable, passive, unobtrusive smart garment devices. Stretching of knitted fabric antennas embedded into wearable garments allows correlation of physical properties of backscattered RFID interrogation signals to human biomedical activities such as respiration, uterine contractions, limb movements, and heartbeats. We have knit comfortable, powerless, passive antennas on smart garment devices to provide potential improvements in the hospital and home setting for uterine monitoring during pregnancy, apnea detection in infants, and other applications. However, these RFID properties must be (a) measured in real time, (b) denoised and processed in real time, and (c) compared against state-of-the-art medical devices currently in use, with unsupervised or semi-unsupervised learning techniques. We address the challenges faced in designing and fabricating knitted wearable unobtrusive smart garment devices, as well as in designing network-enabled RFID software processing framework for real-time collection, filtering, and classification of biomedical sensed data.